Paid links: Do You Still Have To Worry About Them?

Once again, paid links are a hot topic in the search engine optimization community. The website of J. C. Penney had number 1 rankings for many competitive keywords. It turned out that the J. C. Penney website obtained these rankings through buying links on over 2000 pages.
The paid links were reported to Google and many of J. C. Penney's rankings dropped from number 1 to number 70 and below.