Google Takes A Step Further To Identify Paid Links

Google doesn’t like paid links, or at least would exclude them on influencing the search engine results. Today, they took a step further. Google now wants you (the webmasters) to report paid links. Yes. It reports it the same way of reporting spam. Quoting from Matt Cutts:

- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Does that mean Google treats paid links as spam? Not really. They are currently working on a special form to report it, so I guess this would just be temporary.

And, don’t miss the tons of follow up comments a.k.a outcry from the search engine marketing community about this move:

How many more trojan horses Matt? Nofollow was supposed to help us point out links we can’t vouch for, now Google wants us to use it on paid links. Now, the spam report - which we thought was supposed to be used for reporting spam activity - is to be used to report “suspected” paid links?..With all due respect, this is going too far! - Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim

It has to be a joke. There’s no way Google would take someone else’s report of legitimate advertising on a site as spam. I’ve seen the rumors on what kind of intelligence they look for when hiring Google employees. Like we’d actually believe that someone smart would come up with an idea like that! - Michael VanDeMar

I have to admit that sounds pretty stupid to me… So people will just look at their competitors High PR backlinks and “guestimate” that they probably paid for them and everyone will be reporting everyone else that ranks higher than them. Yippee back to kindergarten and tattle-tailing everytime someone is beating you in the rankings. - BigBadWolf

Matt Cutts then replied with the intention of this move. “Just for experimenting some new techniques we got”, he said and clarifies nothing to do with spam or penalties or deranking a website.

Another comment worthy of mentioning is from Earl Grey (famous black hat seo which I mentioned in earlier post):

Maybe google should have done this one silently.
Too much of sweeping thing to do and businesses and incomes will be destroyed for you killing something that was happening even before google.
Although its fun to see all the panicking white hats who have been buying links for years without realising.
There is going to be fun on the forums with scared people

Should we be scare? More response from other blogs can be seen at TechMeme.