What is your opinion about paid links?

[Steve Smith]

Paid links are not good for SEO, in these days search engines are smart enough they can recognize that the website is paid or not and if they found the website is buying links then they can penalize any website. Google already announced that buying links can harm your website reputation.

[Thechipper]

It explains more here http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2332787/matt-cutts-shares-4-ways-google-evaluates-paid-links

[sankalppatil]

Paid links are not good for SEO, in these days search engines are smart enough they can recognize that the website is paid or not and if they found the website is buying links then they can penalize any website.

[RH-Calvin]

Paid links are helpful to get backlinks from high authority webpages and help to generate good traffic from them. But they are not preferred by Google and can be penalized.