Google officially announced its stand on buying and selling links via their google webmaster blog,

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing:

- Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority
- Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks

These is basically their statement on why they condone such massive link buying and selling that pass pagerank. If this is there stand, then why they still have their pagerank system included in the search ranking err, I mean will this also a stand that Pagerank has a great impact on search ranking result?

High Pagerank backlink = High search ranking?

Anyway, here are recommendation to get rid of that penalty.

In order to stay within Google’s quality guidelines, paid links should be disclosed through a “rel=nofollow” or other techniques such as doing a redirect through a page which is robot.txt’ed out.