Google released a blog post on the Portuguese Webmaster Blog earlier this week, with one statement that many found interesting – they said that webmasters should not ask for links.

While Google has long held a stance that links should be earned naturally, they haven’t officially said that webmasters should not ask for links and this is reflected in their link scheme page.  That said, it is also where many new webmasters run afoul of Google’s webmaster guidelines when they haven’t learned the difference between a good link and a not-so-good one.

Google has since updated the blog post to reflected that webmasters should not ask for links if those links violate Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Previously it said not to buy, sell, exchange or ask for links, while now it has been changed to “do not buy, sell, exchange or ask that violate links our webmaster guidelines about links schemes.”

However, the earlier version of the blog post from a year ago has not been updated, at least not yet.