Dateline's To Catch A Link Buyer

Today, while sipping on my Coca-Cola and lounging comfortably in my favorite Adidas t-shirt, i went on over to Matt Cutts' blog, as I often do. Cutts is a Google engineer and many visit his blog to find out the latest about what's happening with Google. many are criticizing one of his recent posts about reporting paid links to Google so that the participating sites could be appropriately penalized.

Why is this so controversial? Google's in charge of the internet (well, not really; but because they are the main source of traffic and income for the majority of websites, Google might as well be. That kind of makes Matt Cutts the CEO of the internet) and, so, webmasters must follow Google's rules. So when Google says that you must not buy links that influence it's search algorithms, people take notice. A lot of people buy links as a means of bettering their website's PageRank, which is one of Google's metrics for search results placement. So, this is causing quite some controversy as many will now be scrambling to take appropriate measures.

Matt is urging people to report paid links. I think there are better ways to do it. I'd like to see a sting operation where dummy websites with PR8 are set up to advertise the selling of links. They can lure and entrap link buyers. Dateline could be there to film and publicly shame these purchasers of links. Yes, getting penalized by Google is the online equivalent of shame. Once caught by Google, nobody online will give you the time of day. It's like being left for dead.

Even the FTC, FCC, Payola and product placement have been drawn into the debate. Who'd have thought that the purchasing of links would be so controversial? Buying links isn't illegal. Anybody can do it if they please. But if you like the traffic that Google provides, it probably isn't a good idea anymore.