The Google Webmaster Guidelines document clearly suggests that buying or selling paid links that pass PageRank can negatively impact a site’s ranking in Google search results.

As a result, paid links have gone extinct from most websites now but there’s some interesting irony here.

The Webmaster Guidelines document recommends using a text web browser called Lynx to help people visualize how Google spiders will see their websites.

What may surprise you here is that this official Lynx website, which is actually linked from the Google Guidelines document, is selling text link ads for stuff like “online dating” and “data recovery” without using the rel=nofollow attribute.

This site is currently #1 in Google for the word “Lynx” but probably the rankings will change courtesy these text link ads.

The more surprising part is that these links have existed on the Lynx website since July 2007 so they were probably present at the time when the page was linked from the Google Document.