irldonalb - 5:00 pm on Sep 22, 2010 (gmt 0)

But can you write an algorithm to sort paid links from organic links automatically?

FutureX - I couldn't write it but I'd be very surprised if Google couldn't. Websites that sell paid links have certain characteristics. They should be easy to find. Then if a website's have an unproportionate amount of links from these websites, I think it's safe to assume they've paid.

There is a risk that you could buy links to your competitors. But not if you adopt Tedster's approach of ignoring these links instead of penalising for them.

I've always thought that Google's core search ranking algorithm gives too much weight to exact query in domain.

brysonmeunier - I agree with that completely. However I've often wondered if it's because of the keywords in the domain name or because that domain gets links naturally with the keywords in the anchor text.