"Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:
- Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a>tag</a>
<a>* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"</a>
<a>I do hate the implication there that any link received that doesn't meet the two criteria above is done for the purposes of manipulation...
At the end of the day hyperlinks existed before Google, and without rel="nofollow" attributes. If someone wants to link to someone else's site (for love, for money or for 'favours' ;-P) then they ought to be able to link in whatever way they choose.
Google themselves are the ones that created the whole 'paid linking' debacle by putting such apparent emphasis on the importance of inbound links - it shouldn't be for other people to adjust their behaviour to keep them happy, and this question is a classic example.</a>
) and ensure you mark up the address with microformats.