Are you selling links? Google may be after your blog more than ever before

Correction: It has to be only those links which go to dubious sites. So check what you are linking. 

Sorry, I disagree wtih Purnendu. Link selling with the intention of passing page rank is considered bad by Google no matter what site you sell/link to. In reality, even if you had no intention of passing page rank, if Google thinks otherwise, your site is in trouble with Google.

Here is the statement from Google:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

Ofcourse there are cases where you can use linking without getting affected in search results. Even though linking to sites may not be a violation, still we never know how Google determine a link as a purchased link. To avoid any accidental penalty, it is better to use rel="nofollow" with most of the external links. I agree this is not good because eventuall all links in the link will become "nofollow" and Google will have no choice other than ignoring that attribute. 

More information:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

I confess that I am stupid. I am not selling links because I do not know what is the act of selling links. However, could I be perceived as selling links? 

In my blog, I sometimes write some abstruse statements. To explain it, I link the word or phrase to an article--most of the time, of that of Wikipedia (other times, to newspaper articles).

Could this be viewed as selling links? If not, then please give an example of it and elaborate upon it so that I and others can avoid it.

Sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, Microsoft.com etc could have "special" status and linking to those sites may never be considered as bad idea. However, if you write an article about Honda cars and link to a Honda dealer in your city, there are chances that Google could perceive it as Link Selling even though you were not selling it.  If you have a reputed site with several authentic articles, it will not be a problem but if many of your articles have similar links, Google could perceive it as some kind of Link selling activity.

All that Google says is "Selling links with the intention of passing Page Rank is a bad idea" but how do Google figure out your intention? They just use some signals like how many such links you have, how many such links the liked sites have received from various sites, what are the anchor texts used for such links, how they are positioned etc. No one knows exactly what signal Google would be looking for, so all that we can do is avoid any possibilities.

A lot of people here would say "I don't write for Google and I don't care what Google think". Fine, they all should continue what they feel right. I am an SEO guy who make a living with traffic from Google and so I would avoid any possibilities of Google penalty.

I respect your advice since you are from SEO background. What about providing links in guest articles ? I usually allow guest posts in my blog.

Accepting guest posts can have serious issues related to search engine ranking. There are several reasons. Primary reason is, majority of the guest articles you receive may be spun articles. With sophisticated software, they can make really good copies of originals which are hard to detect. Also, most people who give away guest blogs give away only 2nd grade or 3rd grade articles as guest articles. They will always keep the best quality articles for themselves. I had listed many more reasons here: 

http://www.techulator.com/resources/6310-Disadvantages-accepting-guest-posts.aspx

http://www.techulator.com/resources/6311-How-accept-guest-posts-without-harming-your-blog.aspx

OMG! I guess thats why I lost one of my post for the dove contest!(if that is wt selling link means) and trust me i hate "google" for that. 

@Tony 

Thanks for the advice.