"W3C makes no assurances that sites linked from the Supporters program will see improved ranking in search engine results. W3C instructs search engines to ignore links from the Supporters page."

They have a nofollow meta in the head of the page, which according to http://www.seobook.com/robots-txt-vs-rel-nofollow-vs-meta-ro... is as good as rel="nofollow" when it comes to PageRank.

If the paid links don't pass PageRank, I don't think Google has a problem with them. I've seen Matt Cutts say that quite a bit lately, because Forbes was caught doing this (again).

Wikimedia Foundation does the same to support Wikipedia. Check out the list of Sustaining Corporate Donors: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors

Unlike W3.org, these aren't nofollow links. So they are outright bought for anchor text goodness and PR juice.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google manually stops PR from passing from this page.

Google needs to just accept links are irreversibly compromised. They're not a measure of usefulness anymore.

There are companies that specialize in submitting crap to digg, reddit, even here on HN - those are all paid links.

Infographics are a marketing tool sites use to generate links - you pay your money, someone designs it and submits it to social news sites to generate links back to your completely unrelated website. Those are paid links too, and not necessarily the aforementioned ones.

The mainstream blog networks are virtually content farms these days churning out summaries designed to do nothing more than reinforce their search positions for companies and products etc.

There's a big market for selling and swapping links, any forum for webmasters of any kind is going to have that at play.

Then there's flat out spam - last year I watched a site get all the way up to the top 10 for "free online games" with nothing more than blog spamming software.

There's all the sponsorships, endorsements, paid promotions, reviews with incentives, referral/affiliate stuff, etc etc.

So many ways money can change hands to cause a link to appear on a site.

Meanwhile there's a massive amount of the internet that is not going to get any legitimate link love, ever.

See "Major Supporters" http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sup

Cool, thanks for the clarification. Deleted my comment about nofollows.

Not sure what the comment was, they do say as earlier linked in the FAQ that they instruct Search Engines to ignore links.

This I just found in the HTML for the linked supporters page:

        <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" /> 

It would appear they are nofollow'ing the links and they should not really be considered 'paid links' WRT increasing pagerank.

Original comment was that the links were nofollowed. On the Current Members page they have the nofollow attribute right on the links.

In response, Kyle linked me to the Major Supporters page, on which the links themselves do not have the nofollow attribute, so I deleted my comment. However, it seems both Kyle and I forgot to check meta tags, and the links in question are indeed nofollowed.

Good catch. :)

ah, my bad guys, missed that ;(

what a deal

just because a link is nofollow does not mean it will not help your rankings guys. It does not mean "ignore this link please Google" it means "I don't vouch for this link Google". A nofollow link will still count towards your total link profile.