CainIV - 7:36 pm on Feb 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

When a blog, has a blog roll of 50 sites, and it's main PR bump is supplied from inbounds from the same 50 blog roll sites, that blog is just a link farm.

Call it what you will, based on Google's or SEO definitions, but the fact is that having 50 outbounds and 50 inbounds is perfectly fine and probably makes sense when you are a blog. And you will find many bloggers could care less about the SEO world definition of a link farm. In a more practical sense, it's called smart marketing, passing traffic to various sites. And again you run into this off topic idea of why and how Google has any judgement on how people monetize their site.

In terms of the statements Matt Cutts says, I believe much of it to be quite honestly rhetoric. If a search engine will impose penalties based on what they consider paid links then once again competitors would be paying for one way links to drown their competitors.

I liked his statement more describing how Google will not pay attention or pass any benefit from those links as that makes much sense in the real world, but it seems that has changed?

The fact that a site owner would have to ask an advertiser to place a nofollow on a link in order to prevent a risk penalty or loss of rank really goes a long way in telling me how fragile the system really is at Google.