Google tries to scare you away from renting links, but their paid link detection algorithms are at best laughable. Which is why Matt Cutts puts so much effort into trying to scare you about bought links.
_________.com has repetitive and near machine generated sounding content, like

Loan calculators are made of different calculation types. In fact, for calculating the same type of loans, a large number of different calculator programs exist that will help you think about your loan and analyze your loans from different angles.

and that QUALITY content ranks in Google for thousands of search phrases. It looks like someone rented hundreds of thousands of links, with sitewide links on _______ and many other high authority sites.
I thought about making this post, but then decided it is bad karma to out the site I menioned, so I edited out the identifying details. You understand the lack of validity of Google's paid links scaremongering techniques by reading Jim Boykin's great post about quality sites never getting penalized for selling links and by looking at some of the places sketchy links are popping up.
If Google is deceptive, misleading, and self serving with the data they share (which they are) why should we expect anything different with their general advice for webmasters?


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