Google does not penalize for paid or sponsored reviews but can penalize for paid or sponsored links that pass PageRank – Brian Solis & Techcrunch are blatantly wrong.
As Techcrunch now has 2 million readers, many of them corporate, you would think they would be a little more careful publishing statements that are false, misleading or could seriously damage not just a single company, but a whole growing business sector, even if they clearly hate it. Opinion is one thing – stating facts that are wrong is in a totally different territory Here is an excerpt for the recent fluff piece for Brian Solis on Techcrunch
Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.
Sarah Lacey’s recent piece was fluff as well
Google has no stated problem with paid or sponsored reviews – with Google it has always been about machine readable disclosure of paid links i.e. use some way to block the links from counting such as rel=”nofollow”, javascript, block with redirect + robots.txt etc
I stated that Brian’s article was a fluff piece, because it is very easy to research, but here are a few choice articles.
With all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the 
