Pretty much everyone who has an internet connection has read by now that google is “cracking down” on webmasters that purchase links in order influence rankings. They have a new form you can fill out similar to their spam reports which triggers a manual review by a human. They say they will use this information to tweak their algorithm so purchased links can be devalued or possibly penalized. So lets take a different look at things from a logical perspective.

First of all there is no way the big G is going to be able to filter these purchased links from the serps without causing a lot of collateral damage to perfectly honest sites. I think they realize this and have decided to spread some misinformation in hopes of scaring webmasters away from those link sales.

Think about it from Google’s standpoint. Matt Cutts blog is read by tens of thousands of webmasters. His word is absorbed by people as if it has been handed down by god himself. What better way to start wide spread panic than to use him as the point of origin? Everywhere you look on Digitalpoint and other reputable webmaster forums you see countless posts with webmasters in a panic like the sky is falling. All of this and Google hasn’t even done anything yet. Even if you completely overlook the fact that Google is unlikely to be able to ever tell the difference between paid links and non paid links, you have to admire the snowball effect the announcement has already caused. Just the threat of penalizing these links will likely lead to the demise or at least decline of link buying across the net as a whole (even if it is an empty threat). Now THAT is some marketing power!

The search engines expect us to play by their rules, but in cases like this their rules are only to their benefit. It makes me wonder why people walk on egg shells in order to avoid making the search engines angry when in fact they know that we are in control. All they can do is hope that the hype and pr they spread takes hold of the masses and has the effect they desire as an outcome. Time for me to go build some more spam pages :)