First off, I do find the idea that Matt Cutts does what he does for “society as a whole” a bit hard to swallow. Not that I have any disrespect for Matt – I think he’s very smart and great at what he does. But primarily I think he’s doing his job, and that is to represent Google’s position on web spam. He’s doing what’s best for Google.

My feeling on the whole “moral” issue of paid links is that it doesn’t really exist. I don’t think paid links has much to do with morality.

Personally, I choose not to promote any business or product that isn’t legitimate in my judgment. That’s my call and my freedom as a marketer. But if I’m really behind a company and see great value in their product or service, I see paid links as just another way to help get the word out.

I don’t like to talk about morality in a public forum unless we’re going to talk about the law. That’s the only basis for agreement we have – unless what you’re doing infringes enough upon the rights of another person or entity to land you in court, I think questioning the morality of any action is a lot of philosophical wax. I just don’t think arguments like that have an end in sight.

The paid linking I am referring to brings nothing of value to the end user. Typical “paid links” the ones one en masse for the sole purpose of manipulating rankings in search engines are the unethical ones.

It’s paying your way to the top like bribing cops, city councilmen, and judges in a beauty contest. You may think your girl is the best, but others may disagree with you. It’s the judges decision who is best, not yours. You can only help your contestant be the best she can be in the competition. Help her with tips and tricks, optimize her responses to the tough questions, but in the end it’s up to the judges which girl is the most RELEVANT.

All “paid” links aren’t bad. But getting though the bad ones to get to the good is really difficult. Are they all going to be devalued someday? Nope, bc there will always be some that are undetectable. Business deals between friends and the like.

It all comes down to intention. What is your intention in what you do everyday? Is it to unfairly put you above your competitor? It’s up to you really.

Reverse back to 1980. Say you have a restaurant. Do you hire a publicist to try and drum up PR for your biz? Is it unethical — someone might write a review based on your paid PR campaign.

The question is, if you’re not linking for google to see but just to get a link. Is that unethical?

That really wouldn’t be seen as SEO. Hard to pinpoint. I don’t think so.

Honestly I don’t think there’s any link selling going on that’s not SEO.

I’m really biased because I’m still finishing my PhD in IR/NLP/AI related things and I know how badly the performance of your engine can be affected by what I like to call “bugs” – manipulation (like paid links).

Because of that I feel a kind of kinship with people who work in the IR field and I want to support their efforts – so in my SEO work, I try and work with the engines not against them, and ultimately against myself.

It’s not the linking really that’s the issue, it’s the fact that it affects authority score if you like. This is in fact the limitation of PageRank because it can only rely on links.

there’s no law that says that you can’t buy links, but if it was my search engine, I’d devalue them to the point that they’d be almost obliterated

I think there’s a lot more to say about paid links, and if you’re doing your masters soon and it’s a year long course, you could knock out something really interesting and valuable to the community. Don’t wait too long, Matt is right, news and technologies become obsolete very quickly. If a solution is found against these links, you’re essentially running the risk of writing a history report.

Thanks for a nice post.