Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I was originally going to put this link I found on paid links in my weekend entrepreneurial links post but then did some digging and decided it needed some separate post attention!

I found an interesting article on one of my semi-regular blog stops OsWorld.biz that glared out at me with the title The Death of Paid Links. Yep you read it right and it isn’t just an eye catcher.

As I dug deeper into what sparked Oli’s post I found a few sites that discussed the topic of Google using others to combat paid links as a way to boost PR and not traffic. (How the hell are they going to do that is beyond me) But the post in question is from Matt Cutt’s blog, the leader of Google’s webspam team, where he casually brings up the fact that there’s an easy way for webmasters to report paid links.

Well that casual blog post sparked a huge uproar that has 523 comments and counting!!!

Comments range from WTF to more sane comments that are really trying to understand how the system won’t be abused and how an algorithm will be able to figure out if the link was bought strictly for boosting PR or for traffic purposes.

I for one am clueless as to how they could possibly trust a reporting system that is utilized by the very people who buy links to take over the spot from other webmasters. Won’t webmasters report links that may not even be paid for links simply to lower the ranking of the both the sites, in turn making their site the higher ranking site.

Does this list go on and on with the flaw in what is being proposed here?

I’d also like to point out the Matt several times says he is just trying to widen the dataset for testing purposes. Although he doesn’t say it isn’t being counted this may mean that they’re just trying out their cracked out idea. Also mentioned, here and responds to a lot of good points here.

The most intriguing comment of the first 150 that I got through was one by Scott Fish (I’m assuming the DP regular) who brings up the clearest thoughts on the subject here discussing how they’re going to know.

Also of interest to a lot of you out there is probably this post at weblog tools collection about sponsoring themes.

I’d like to finish with a little advice. Try and use real SEO techniques noted in this Calacanis challenge update.

What do you all think?