Google On Paid Links

The Paid Link discussion has been going on and off for the last couple of months, mainly kicked off by Matt Cutts offering a new way for webmasters to tattle on other webmasters via a paid link report in the Google Webmaster tools. This kicked of an initial flurry of comments and posts.

Rand of SEOMoz restarted the discussion in July with a post of his own whining how the good guys can compete because the playing field isn't level. Once again the discussion was off and post after post began popping up. I commented on Rands intial post, but held off for a bit on the overall discussion.

All seemed to have come to somewhat of a head at the most reccent SES in San Jose with a panel discussion on Paid Links. After much venting by everyone involved, the dust has seemed to settle a bit and I suspect the issue will be mainly dropped again, that is until Google starts to take some serious action against those who purchase links. The reality is that paid links work and people will continue (and in many cases in order to be competitive need) to use them to improve their SERPs.

However, I think it is worthwhile to note a bit of information from the horse's mouth. Matt Cutts gave a slide show talk at the SES panel, here is the Power Point Presentation On Paid Links. Noteworthy is Matt's new paid link lingo, they are now officially known as Paid PageRank Passing Links or PPP Links for short. Also, in the talk, Matt mentioned that Google algorithmically detected and devalued all of the paid links which Rand spoke of in his July post.
Matt goes on further to make this statement: "Google is willing to take strong action against PPP Links."

Finally, hes gives a couple of examples of sponsored links or paid advertising in the slides. A bit of digging there and I found that the 2 pages he was referring to were http://www.linux.org/apps/ and http://www.nypress.com/20/35/news&columns/waterlog.cfm respectively.

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