Over at the german Forenblogger Google seems to be actively punishing Pages that sell links:

Google is undeniably one of the most widely used Search Engines, in Germany it has a market share of 90%. The financing scheme of Google is well known: it primarily relies on Advertising.

Now it starts to be interesting: Google apparently doesn’t like it too much if you sell Links (see post by Mac Cutts: how to report paid links). The reason should be clear: paid links influence Googles Pagerank and therefore the quality of the search results. So Google started punishing Link-Sellers and -Buyers (Internetmarketing-News, David Naylor).

The question therefore is: doesn’t Google misuse it’s Marketposition? [...] It’s a legitimate way of advertising. If Google now starts downranking pages that use this kind of advertisements it’s a clear misuse, because it means that you’re only allowed to use Google Adsense as the only way of advertising that doesn’t imply getting downranked by Google.

It’s quite an extreme point of view but I have to (partly) agree, Google does have a point for trying to keep search results good, but isn’t there another way than to punish other means of advertising?