What is your position on paid links?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Basit Abbas: Paid link amoral Sir I don`t know why .....If you not use that link you will be never ever rank
  
  
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  Karsten Madsen: Basit Abbas I would agree that especially for smaller businesses it`s hard to rank without at least some paid effort.
  
  And speaking of morale: Google has in recent years put more emphasis on brand = big companies rank higher.
  
  I don`t see that as a very moral thing. The big get`s bigger and the small has to fight even harder.
  
  
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  Basit Abbas: Karsten Madsen And the small has to fight even harder
  
  That`s point
  
  
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  Sanket Maheshwari: Stay away from people who express paid links as amoral. Either they`re doing everything morally or they`re the biggest liars in the market
  
  
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  Karsten Madsen: Sanket Maheshwari I am exactly thinking they are hiding something
  
  
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  Tim Capper: Paid links are fine, even Google is okay with them ..... its called advertising BUT you need to use the correct rel="
  
  
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  Karsten Madsen: Tim Capper I wonder how many people actually use the rel="sponsored"
  
  But would be interestin if Google went out and said "It`s all cool with paid links as long as you use sponsored rel and understand that the value is lower than real links"
  
  
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  John Carcutt: Karsten Madsen The rules for sponsored content also include using nofollows on links to be OK in Google’s eyes.
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: I can`t think of anyone who has ever said that paid links were amoral. However, in the United States (and perhaps some other countries), paid links that act as endorsing advertisements are illegal if they are undisclosed. That`s been a point of confusion for many people.
  
  The search engines ask people to disclose their paid links so their algorithms can ignore them. They ignore many links anyway. So NOT disclosing that a link is paid doesn`t in any way guarantee that it counts toward anything in search indexes.
  
  The real problem with undisclosed paid links, however, is that millions of manual actions (penalties) are still handed out by the search engines every year - mostly for undisclosed paid links. So relying on them is very risky for any company that depends on its Website being found in search results.
  
  
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  Karsten Madsen: Michael Martinez Do you have a source on these manual penalties? Would be nice to get some solid info on it.
  
  
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  Josh Levenson: It sounds like you`re assuming paid links have some sort of effect on rankings.
  
  
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  Karsten Madsen: Josh Levenson I very much think so yes. I have a 2000 website case study proving it.
  
  It sounds like you are making a bold statement that you cannot possibly back up with data