Matt Cutts of Google confirmed yesterday that the practice of engaging in the buying or selling of text links will hurt your web site’s Page Rank. Page Rank is essentially Google’s measure of a web page’s authority. Although it is arguable how important Page Rank really is with regards to search traffic, it still very much impacts a site’s credibility in the eye of advertisers.

But, as Mashable points out, it is really not possible for Google to track all of the paid linking deals that are going down. Unless paid linking is done through a program like Text Link Ads or some other obvious way it just is not possible for Google to find out. Either way, we’ve all been warned.