Google and Paid Links

Google wants people to report paid links that do not contain a nofollow tag. Several sites are being punished (by being moved farther down in the SERPs) for selling links. To many people this seems to be a witch hunt with people anonymously reporting their competition as selling links hoping to penalize them. While Google "seems" to have good intentions for doing this, there may be a conflict of interest involved. Google claims that a paid link shouldn't be as valued as an unpaid link that was placed because the webmaster feels the site deserves a link. Google does not want paid links to count towards an advertisers pagerank score which affects what order sites appear for specific terms.


Sugar Rae talks about getting penalized by Google and then coming across the exact thing Google is trying to avoid (but will not be able to discover).

From Google Doesn't Know the Face of Evil re Paid Links - Sugarrae: "This parenting blog has double digit comments on every post, has won several of the big blogger world awards and has a feed subscribership in the tens of thousands. This parenting blog has over ten thousand links, from high quality sources. And a quick search revealed that she has reviewed tons of websites, products, articles and given out a lot of links. And you have no way of knowing which ones were used to feed her family and which ones were given because they were deserved."

This relates to a call for people to report paid links, mentioned here on Matt Cutts blog.

Q: Can you give me some more background on how Google views paid links?A: Absolutely. Start with this post from 2005. It’s a pretty good review of our policies at the time (e.g. link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext. Also, we’re open to semi-automatic approaches to ignore paid links, which could include the best of algorithmic and manual approaches.). You can also read about panels at search conferences where we did a site review and how much paid links stood out in a site review. I even mentioned earlier this year that paid articles/reviews/posts should be done in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.

This whole business has stirred up a lot of controversy on Googles new policy.

You should read the comments on Matts blog to see a lot of the problem. For instance

"How can I tell if a link is “paid”? What if it’s just a helper for a friend (paid in form of a beer)? Are links on a web-designer’s homepage to their clients paid? Are general links to your clients paid (eg “buy my service/product and I’ll link to you - your site will be better off”)?
What will happen to the person with the links on their page? Are we getting the publisher penalized or are the links just going to be ignored (”penalty” for the advertiser)? There’s a big difference and I’m sure it will matter. If the publisher is going to get penalized many people (especially those reading your blog :-)) will think twice about reporting such a link. If the link is just discounted then it’s a whole different story.
I’m kinda worried about this move …"