Excellent! 

Probably some link monkey approached her once awhile back and offered to pay for a review, and the lightbulb went off in her head. Good for her, although it would be nice if she was at least honest in her reviews. 

1 for the link buyers; 0 for Matt Cutts

Depressing.  She thinks paid links are OK.  I bet she didn't even report the site to Google.

I agree with your premise, but I would add that Google's effort to stamp out traditional paid links (a list of links on a navigation bar or footer) will only help to make the paid link industry more sophisticated, and that's actually a good thing.

I've always championed the cause of "responsible" paid linking. If you pay to have your link included on a relevant site/blog (regardless of the method) it will only help to improve Google's search results. But spammy directories and paid links that lack relevance (a football link on a site about CSS scripting, for example) hurt overall search results.

So in a sense, Google's paid-links crusade might actually be a good thing, in a roundabout and ironic way. 

The funny thing about people approaching a blogger out of the blue for paid links is the vast price range. Some people approach you, offer oh... $50 for a fairly sizeable image ad on the sidebar that is to run one full year.  (You reject these on the grounds that you make five times more running adsense. They try to convince you that the $50 is better 'cuz it's certain money. Yes, this happened....)

Other people approach you and offer a $200 to turn an individual word on an already existing blog post into a link to their catalog and leave it up a year.  (Also happened.)

My thought is with the size of the readership quoted here and the major traffic that might mean for a company who was reviewed by this lady, $500 might not actually be too high. An audience like that, reading a good review, could generate an awful lot of sales ... if this was a product-oriented review. I mean, say you invest $500 and make $5000 back. Seems kind of good to me.

Now, as to the ethics of people writing great reviews that dupe the public into believing products are good....well, we already have TV for that.

Miriam 

Let's always bear in mind that "Evil" (esp. with a capital E) is NEVER about what YOU do, it's always about what OTHERS do. No reason to expect Google to be different.

And yes, attempting to detect that kind of paid links is inane and claiming they can actually do it is merely the same old sorry FUD strategy of despair they're actually becoming famous for now. And rightly so.