Is Yahoo Buying Text Links?

This was brought to my attention by Raffi Vartanian a few weeks ago, but I’ve only now been able to look into it. This site that rates schools across the nation is a useful resource for parents–it even won an award for “Best Family & Parenting Site.” Looking at the “Glendale Schools” page, at the footer I see a link that says “Glendale Real Estate.”

Clicking on the link brings up this page:

Every city has a link to a corresponding Yahoo! Real Estate landing page. What’s the deal here? Is this a paid link? Either that or the website really, really likes Yahoo’s Real Estate section, so much so that the site is willing to link to every city with super nice anchor text. If Yahoo is indeed guilty of dabbling in paid links, I doubt Orwellian Google will do anything about it. I mean, how the hell do you penalize Yahoo, especially when they pay you loads of money in ad revenue?

What are your thoughts?

UPDATE: Well geez, that was quick. A Product Manager for Yahoo! Real Estate contacted me and said that the links are not paid; rather, Great Schools is a long-standing partner of theirs. In his words, “They send us a data feed. We consume and display some data on our end, then link over to them for more detailed info.” I’m assuming that Great Schools does the same for them.