Google is using us to detect paid links.

It’s been a while since I last logged into my Google Webmaster account and noticed a new link.  The link invites website owners to report other sites that are using paid links so Google can “improve” their algorithmic detection of sites who are buying/selling paid links.  I don’t know about you, but I think this is wrong.  Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, not to dictate on how the world should use the internet. Google is growing too fast. They have a monolopy in the search engine business and now expects everyone obey their requests.

This is the meat and bones of the page (rest of post after the jump):

Help us maintain the quality of Google search results.

We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRank™” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.

Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.

Report paid links

{form}
Website selling links: [text box]
Website buying links: [text box]
Additional details: [text box]
{end form}

We appreciate you taking the time to help us improve our service for your fellow users around the world. By helping us detect violations of our quality guidelines, you’re saving millions of people time, effort and energy.

What are your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: google, paid links, google webmaster tools, seo, pagerank

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