Matt Cutts, Hidden Links and Paid Links

Interesting post by Matt which I missed a few days ago about Hidden Links. It goes on a bit discussing what a hidden link is which is pretty obvious but doesnt really mention anything on how and if Google penalises it. Although information can be gathered on how Google determines what a hidden link is if they do penalise them.

As for Paid links, this little extract is interesting

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.

Basically Google expects you to make paid links non spiderable … hmm .. I don’t think that this will go down well with the webmaster community at all. In fact most of the webmasters consider the latest flurry of No Paid Links messages from Google as scare tactics. Personally, I think that Google will do something soon to make sure that the message is heard, how drastic the move will be is the question.