Google’s Newest Worst Idea Ever

Google is now waging war on paid links and asking you to the dirty work. Google is asking anyone who spots a paid text link on a page to report the paid link to them because they’re “looking to collect data for a new approach or two“.

Paid links are a real pain in the ass of Google’s algorithm which is skewed to link popularity. Google can’t tell a paid link from a natural link because they both look the same to Google’s spider.

This is the perfect storm as far as the sponsored link theme issue we addressed earlier this week.

To recap, sponsored link themes are flooding the Wordpress template community. A sponsored link theme is a free theme that contains a link that has been inserted by the template designer for a fee which advertises another website. The link sits quietly on the website displaying the theme and drains pagerank to the source site of the sponsored link. In our opinion, most sponsored links end up on the sites of unsuspecting bloggers who are mostly html ignorant and will never realize the true nature, purpose or effect of the sponsored link.

Now Google wants you to tell them when you see a sponsored or paid link on one of these poor mom and pop blogs. As if the fact that these blogs displaying the link don’t have enough problem with pagerank right out of the gate, now Google wants to presumably penalize the site for displaying paid links.