Matt Cutts (a google engineer) posted yesterday about google are looking at ways for people to report paid links on websites.
As it stands just now there are over 100 comments and as you can imagine, most of them are from unhappy webmasters. Basically googles looking at a way to penalise websites who sell text links directly through their websites for SEO purposes. I dont think it spells the end of sites such as text link ads but they will certainly have to change the way they work if google gets what they want.
I understand that some websites take selling text links to a ridiculous level but i think that if this was implmented a lot of sites will struggle to make an income.
Time will tell
I dont think they are going after any site in particular. They are trying to weed out sites who sell text links purely for seo purposes – ie. to increase their page rank
That’s an interesting read… I’m surprised it took Google this long to go after sites like Text Link Ads. I wonder what’s next?
I though the motto was "Do no evil"?
Report paid links? Yuck.
How do aff. text links survive? And how does Google know, people are reporting faithfully?