sugarrae - 6:16 am on Apr 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

>>>Any chance there are going to be false reports?

As good a chance as the sun rising in the morning...

>>>Yahoo directory & BOTW (and maybe a few others) charge for submission reviews not inclusion. Not every site is accepted.
>>>Pay-for-blogging and pay for bloglinks is the main focus of Matt's comments.
>>>The other focus of Matt's post is creating a way for webmasters to report sites that sell links.

I don't see a difference between the above, but I do at the same time. Some directories take high editorial discretion such as those mentioned. Others will take anything. Some bloggers paid for reviews won't do a review on a site or product they aren't pleased with, showing the same editorial discretion. Some publishers won't link to sites (aka advertisers) they don't review and approve of. Others will link to anything.

But as I stated in a blog post I did earlier on the topic - whether or not you agree with paid links or whether or not I do has no bearing on Google accepting reports and deciding to penalize *or* devalue a site based on assumption that cannot be confirmed without seeing some accounting books.

Effective and good paid links are ones that you can't detect. The only way Google can know if a link within my latest blog post or *yours* is paid is to guess. And that's a potentially insane and dangerous system.

>>>running paid links isn't going to get you dropped from the index, its not a bannable offense

I don't care if it gets me banned. If Google "assuming" that I am selling links based on a competitor of someone with a link on my site assuming the same moves me from first page to fifth in the serps (as a result of a penalty or a devaluation or loss of trust), it might as well be the same thing.

>>>effect of 'Google not trusting your page' anymore

Shows how much faith Google has in trustrank. If you trust my site, then trust me to do what is best for my site and as a result, its users.

Google has a problem with paid links messing up their algorithm. Then they need to fix the problem instead of trying to scare the hell out of publishers hoping they'll fix it for them.