Stark - 12:09 pm on Feb 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

Having had a look as well, and looking at everyone's comments, I think it's fair to say that:

1 - There will be a short term benefit from the introduction of the new links, and I assume the link pool system is run broadly fairly (something that would be hard to know for sure).

2 - I think calling it advertising and arguing the case on here that it is advertising until you are blue in the face is rather missing the point. Whatever your intentions, and whatever the intentions of the people running the service, the question remains - If Google find it adversely affecting their results (which if it works, it will) then will they stand by and let that continue?

Surely the answer is no. I personally doubt they will take a scattergun approach to kicking out everyone involved (as mentioned previously, due to false positives) but they will attempt to degrade the value down to nothing for the incoming links. For outgoing links they will attempt to determine a pattern of links across an entire crawled site and if they feel you are offering these links out then they will be perfectly entitled to use that information to affect ranking.

I think the area people argue around is "I am just using this for advertising". Google has no real concern for your intention, nor any ability to infer it from your pages. It IS possible they will come to dislike this scheme and only they will decide on whether or not it is advertising or gaming the search engines.

Also, let's remember that people placing these links on their site will place them out of the way at the bottom of a sidebar or the bottom of the page. They will try as hard as possible to not display the links to their users as they might click on them, and cliking on them has no benefit to the site hosting the links. This smells much more like link "selling" (ok, bartering) to me than advertising on that basis alone - and for me, this is what distinguishes this from banner advertising which is a comparison used by many.

If you were forced to display the links prominently above the fold or some other criteria like that, then maybe they would "feel" more like advertising - but who honestly thinks that will happen?