Google Engineer Matt Cutts has posted information on how to report paid links. According to Matt, Google already has algorithms for detecting paid links, but wants to make it easier for webmasters to report paid-link sites.
Some bloggers, like Jason Calacanis, are ecstatic with the news that Google is actively fighting paid link sites like PayPerPost. Others interpret this as a sign of weakness, as Andy Beal writes in Google Wants You to Disclose the Paid Links it Can’t Find.
Robert Scoble has an interesting take on this meme, seeing as he is the keynote speaker at the next PayPerPost convention.
I checked and found no response to this issue from the PayPerPost blog. Although I did notice they have altered the rates advertisers are paying for links from blogs with a Google PageRank over 6, or an Alexa rank over 9,999.
Suffice it to say, the verification that Google is actively working to fight paid link sites is proof positive that Google sees these businesses as destructive to the integrity and value of search. If enough paid link sites continue to degrade the value of PageRank, Google search will become ineffective and the internet will suffer.
ValueWiki Blog 
It’s about freakin’ time. If pay per post is allowed to succeed, Google would have to reduce page rank for all bloggers. If a blogger with a great Google page rank knows that they could lose their search traffic from this sort of lapse in ethics, it will help to keep most of the bloggers in line.
The irony of all of this is that it really isn’t all that hard to get a little link love for companies. It takes smart PR, but there are plenty of creative campaigns you can run. At the very least, if a company buys an ad on Technorati, SiteCounter or TechMeme, they are almost guaranteed to see blog posts about those ads start showing up in the wild.
The difference of course is that bloggers really are expressing their real feelings about what they’ve seen vs. having to clutter up the web with puff pieces we don’t need.
Hopefully, this works, but when Ice Rocket ran the same thing, they had to shut it down after rival bloggers starting to make fake reports against each other.
Very true. Most likely there will continue to be a never-ending arms race between Google and Blackhat SEO.
The irony with the Blackhat SEO crowd is that if they some day succeeded in ruining Google, they will be destroyed in the process. Once everyone stops using Google, SEO’s will go out of business!
All I hope is that these paid links won’t get a free cheap ride for having a link on a high PR and then ‘resell’ their PR to others for the link.
It’s back to the old days huh?Banners and Scrapers?
azrin @ http://www.azrin.net