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Actually, this verbatim quote from Google’s freshly revamped webmaster guidelines doesn’t require a lot of comment – talk about applied hypocrisy on a rampage:

Why should I report paid links to Google?

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag

Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such link exchanges and purchased links. If you see a site that is buying or selling links, let us know by clicking Report spam in the index under the Tools menu in Webmaster Tools . We’ll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.

  Source: Google Denunciation & Vituperation Central

(Link no-followed, even though it’s not been paid for yet…)

So, put it in other words: “First and foremost: Don’t ask what your search engine can do for you, ask what you can do for your search engine, ok? So off you go now and rat on all your competitors’ paid links by mere assumption/insinuation of intent (hm, did I actually hear someone at the Plex whisper Yahoo!?) because our crappy scraper engine’s still insisting on that patented braindead technology of counting links as votes and we plain don’t know how to make even more piles of dough as long as non-paid search results are still considered hip by our dumb users.

Also, it’s fine to make your advertisers pay through the nose for their ads, but make dead sure you tag their paying links with that nifty ‘You know what: We don’t trust this link either, hohoho!’ tag of ours.”

Aw well, so what’s new? Certainly not their hubris going into overdrive…

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