Google's recent clamp down on paid links

Hi - I find the info at the link below from danielb very helpful in relation to how to handle paid links in an 'upfront' manner so that we can all sleep at night,  but I do have questions about how anyone other than the parties involved can know if a link is paid for or not.

It seems pretty clear that in order to avoid being perceived as attempting to pass PR we should all use 'nofollow' for any paid links including, for example, the ad links on this page. So, I don't have a problem in continuing to recommend that website owners look at purchasing links but primarily for the quality, targetted traffic they bring.

However, if a site attracts incoming links because it has relevant, great content (a client of mine has links from itv.com that they did not request for example) what happens then? Will Google perceive that I have paid for this? If my competitor sees it when researching my incoming links will they report me?

Also concerned therefore about the effects of all this on the recipient of the 'non-conforming' paid (or perhaps not ..) link, as I think we can assume some kind of negative impact on the destination site since the Google Guidelines below talk about 'buying & selling' of links. Any other views on this?

I think we all understand the problem Google are trying to solve but we need more clarity from them about how they'll make sure the 'good guys' aren't caught in the crossfire. 

Thanks,

Iain

On 13:11:43 5 November 2007 danielb wrote: google's policy is still that you should 'nofollow' any paid links:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736&query=nofollow&topic=&type=


daniel