Google and its fight against paid links

Well well, Mr. Matt Cutts from Google made an interesting post on his blog yesterday that is causing some noise in the SEO word. Basically, he is asking people to report paid links in the Google spam report.

One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

Most of the comments from this has been about how people will abuse the reporting and report competitors but I dont think thats what Matt is after. As he says, he is after something to try out some ideas to augment their algorithms, maybe he just wants more examples of sites that are paying for links to use as data.

Anyways, so as we mentioned in our forums a few days ago, seems Google is moving towards fighting paid links which is very interesting. Google pretty much made the paid text links industry due to their Pagerank algorithm and now they want people not to treat links as a commodity. From my view, they can do this a variety of ways.

• 1. Devalue outbound links from sites that shows signs of selling links.
• 2. Devalue inbound links from sites that show signs of buying links.
• 3. Manually review and devalue sites that are buying or selling links.

Google has repeatedly said that they want to rely on their algorithms over manual sorting of data so lets ignore no.3.

How would Google devalue inbound and outbound links correctly using their algoithms without a massive effect on their SERPs. We know that they already use Link Churn as a method but what are the new ways Matt is said to be testing?

• 1. Devalue unrelated links more? - If there seems to be no reason why a particular link should be on a page, I suppose it wouldnt hurt to devalue that link.
• 2. Increase reliance on the trust of a site? - Not sure about this as even TRUST has been made a commodity by Google as can by seen by the sudden increase in Viagra from educational institutes.
• 3. Detect common link selling signs more? - This is an interesting concept as a lot of lazy webmasters will be forced to move away from the Sponsored Sites link boxes into more creative links selling.
• 4. Outbound links ratio? - This is a bit hard to determine as all pages are different but coupled with no.1 may give algorithms some clues.
• 5. Inbound links ratio? - I think this maybe interesting and by this I mean the inbound linking that a typical site would get would I presume be mostly on one page but this should reflect on links to other pages. If a site is getting 99% links on one page by one or two keywords, say the homepage maybe the algo could devalue it as unnatural linking. This is probably already used by Google in some way but putting more emphasis on this may deter some link buying.

I dunno, the above are just ideas springing around whilst the footy match is on and I am sure there are more creative guys at Google putting more thought into this. Well I hope so anyways as it is bound to affect SEOs and webmasters around the globe, lets all hope they get it right and most of us don’t get hurt in the crossfire.

I’ll probably write more on this subject soon, its back to Football for me now though.