Google’s chief spam cop, Matt Cutts, has talked about a new way for webmasters to report sites they thing are buying or selling paid links. Why would Google do this? Essentially Google feel that people who use paid links to increase their rankings in the search engines should be identified and have their rankings adjusted accordingly.

This is a very touchy subject within the search marketing community and has generated a whole lot of debate. As with all matters of this type, we at eyefall aim to be completely ethical in all the methods that we use when working on search engine optimisation for a client. What I would say is that if Google can’t tweak it’s algorithm to detect paid links, then should they really be asking others to act as their informants?

It strikes me that such an approach is in itself open to huge amounts of abuse. If you take this to the most far fetched, but not completely unbelievable, conclusion then you might see an unsavoury webmaster setting up a fake paid link scheme in the name of a competitor, and then squealing on the supposed abuse to Google.

This may seem unlikely, but we all know that there are a lot of people making huge amounts of money from the web, often with rather shady business practices, and anything that might allow them to get one up on the competition is unlikely to be left unused for long.

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