Google’s Bad Idea - How to Report Paid Links
A quick heads up: over the weekend, Matt Cutts posted an article to his blog that outlines how people can report websites that they suspect of having purchased text links. Google doesn’t like companies that buy and sell links because it is “gaming” their PageRank “authority” structure. In the rash of responses Cutts received, the valid question “What links can you buy?” arose. The (unclear) answer - not many. You can buy links solely meant for traffic and that’s it. Moreover, he indicates the traffic link’s URL should NOT point directly to your site but, rather, Google would like to see DoubleClick-obfuscated tracking URLs in use. Cutts goes on to outline the only “good” sources of links are non-paid: like Yahoo Answers.
Wow, we’ll see what this does to the world of SEO. I have no idea how they’re going to differentiate between paid links for traffic and paid links for “link juice”. Take www.stpt.com for example - is buying a link there now spamming?
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » How to report paid links
Update: Adam Lasnik, Google SEO Strategist, was recently interviewed about the topic. See his comments on Google paid links for the full text but, basically, it seems like they’re looking for link brokers and/or linking schemes and the like.
