When Matt Cutts decided to call for reports on paid links the world of the link brokers started to shake. Google is ready to punish even the webmasters who buy links on related sites to increase the targeted traffic to their sites. Not quite fair from Google, but what can we do?

New paid linking services emerge, in the form of contextual links – not contextual ads! The pioneers, V7 contextual, are quite proud of their product, while many voice arise, questioning the ethicalness of such links, as the publishers are obliged not to disclose their sponsors. These links will appear naturally within the content of a blog entry and remain there as long as the site shall live. There’s no way to determine sponsorship, not even the slightest clue. The blogger will write a general article about a topic of interest related to the site that paid for the link. Then the link will be included in the content, where it fits naturally. That’s it.

If we are to do what Matt Cutts suggests we should start reporting all links we find on our daily browsing(?!). Or report V7 contextual for selling links, but the only result will be that the PR of the site will go down, because there’s no way for Google to stop the owners from promoting their product through press releases, banner placements and other forms of paid advertising.

Till this new Google challenge will be settled, my suggestion is to handle paid links with care. If you need to buy text link ads on a particular site, buy them from link brokers that clearly identify the links they sell as sponsored links. Such links will not carry any link juice, so they’ll not pass Google PR to the advertisers, but they will deliver target traffic. Additionally they could act as great branding tools.

Considering that with a paid press release distribution the advertiser actually pays to include a link to a website too, I cannot help but wonder: should we start reporting press releases too?

And how would such a report look like? Dear Google, my competitors have a high advertising budget and they use it for press release distribution and other forms of paid online marketing that involve links.

Sure, Google will not just start banning sites for any report they get, but why the waste of time? Instead of challenging people to report link spam, Google should work on its algorithms and reduce the importance of links for PageRanks and SE rankings.

As long as the links will be considered the most important factor in calculating Google PR people will find new ways to manipulate the algorithms to increase these PageRanks. Let’s face it: SEM is a complex discipline, and Google doesn’t make it easier for anyone.

In an ideal world we wouldn’t need to focus on punishing people for trying to market their products and services, but we’d come up with something better: a counteroffer.

When we think about it, SEM is not that different from offline marketing. Take a look around you: in bars, restaurants, even in your mail box. What do you see? Yes, there are ads, brochures, freebies and all kinds of marketing gigs everywhere you turn. The Web is not that different. The main principles of offline advertising are simply converted into a language which applies online.

The conclusion would be: Google, stop wasting our time and start ranking the sites based on their relevancy, accessibility, usability, in one word based on their real value. Forget that PageRank tool if you have to, but let people use linking strategies to increase the traffic and generate leads without being afraid that this will affect their site’s positioning into the search results.