I have a good way to back that up, too! OK, when was the last time you used yahoo? Was it a couple years ago? Do you remember something that looked like this?
Search: TCG results 102937391 page 1 of 999999

Mommas hot sex slave! (the site)
TCG, SEX, SEX, PORN, HERO, BORED, INANE, ANNOYING, WHAT THE HELL, etc. (the body of the text).
About thirty listings later…
Welcome to Bob’s TCG emporium. (the site)
Bob is a cool guy that is really into TCGs, CCGs, and other… (the body of the text.)

So … You click on bobs, right? And lo and behold, after a hundred popups that you hit alt+f4 until your fingers fell off to battle against, you find you now have twelve new infections, and bob’s is… A link farm.

I’m not going to say google is pure and innocent, or even that I fully believe paid links should be set no-follow. But I am going to say, if they’re working to keep those kinds of posts away from my keywords, I’m thankful for that.

Oh.. And someone mentioned a half-way point earlier. That wouldn’t be too bad.. Maybe count paid links as a PR0 link instead of completely discounting it. It would completely level the playing field so that advertisers still get a little out of it, along with the incoming traffic from the site… And those who have trouble getting links otherwise, such as an online store have a chance against the big names.

What nobody has mentioned is that even though Google took the PR away from many blogs they are still getting Google backlinks. Opps will still have the option of using do follow as well as no follow and the advertisers can actually see what kind of traffic a site is getting.

Google didn’t just take PR away from Posties, it has been an internet wide problem. But what Google doesn’t realize is that they have shot themselves in the foot by doing this. PR officially now means much less and as more and more people figure out what’s going on it will become obsolete. Google created it, we accepted it, and WE can refuse to accept it. Google does not own the internet.