Although I find Google indispensable and quite possible the best thing to ever happen to the internet, I’ve been online long enough to believe that everyone should have their opportunity to make money online in their own fashion. If people are accepting money for links and turning out quality content that’s relevant to the inserted link (paid or not) then it makes no sense for Google to penalize them.

I have said many times that many of googles stances on paid links are a method of pushing more business towards people using their adsense program (even though most websites get very little money from using them).

With regards to johnchow, I wrote a post about this last year. I think its a joke that searching for john chow did not return johnchow.com as the first result. They were effectively returning a poor search result to the searcher (and this is always their main argument when applying penalties). I guess it’s difficult for them to penalize a website without providing poorer search results as well.

I don’t think that the recent update means that google has gone soft on paid links. Taking johnchow again for an example, the number of subscribers has more than doubled since the last time their was an update so no doubt there are thousands of more backlinks to his site therefore even with a penalty his PR should still have increased.