(I've always wanted to write one of those titles ;))

Text link brokers such as Text-Link-Ads have been growing in popularity recently, allowing you to purchase a direct text link on a variety of sites, the price depending on the ranking of the target site.

The advantage of this method is that search engines can follow the links, and may assign a higher ranking, depending on where your links are placed.

According to Matt Cutts' blog, that could now be over.

I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

A terrible idea IMO, and one that won't make a bit of difference. The black hats (that ones Google actually cares about) will still buy their links, leaving no clue that it's a paid link.

This blog carries some paid links, and also some regular links - how would the search engine tell the difference if somebody reported us?