Google Challenging Paid Links

According to Google Engineer Matt Cutts and his blog, Google is going to pay more attention to paid text links in the future. His blog postings have caused an uproar because a large weight of Google's search algorithm is the number of links to a website.

Mr. Cutts claims that many paid links are hidden, irrelevant and should be removed from a website's search profile. While many aren't arguing against hidden or misleading links, many SEO campaigns include human edited paid linking services. With the news of Google paying more attention to paid links, SEO professionals are asking, "How are they going to track "˜paid' listings?

To put it simply, there is no way for Google to tell unless they have been given access to the financial books of the webmaster or create a self-edited reporting system. Not likely to happen. Cutts states in his blog that the "best practice"¦is to provide a human readable disclosure that a link/review/article is paid." These recommended changes add to the discontent for Google from webmasters and SEO professionals.

Kevin Newcomb for Search Engine Blog states "One of the major concerns with this is the basic idea of whether it's really Google's problem, for having an algorithm that relies on links for ranking. Should webmasters be forced to change the way they do business to adjust for a shortcoming in Google's relevance algorithm?"

I completely agree with Mr. Newcomb. Google can recommend a change, but they will have a tough time enforcing it.