Just a brief note about Matt Cutts’ recent statement regarding paid links on web sites. In a nutshell, he wants webmasters to do Google’s job and report links on web sites that are obviously paid and allow link juice to be passed (in other words, direct links). Here’s what he said:

“Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

I think Google is getting too big for its britches. Google now wants US, the lowly webmasters, to police the web for them? Google, who is the empire of paid links now wants to keep the little guys from making any money off of paid links just because of the way they link?

Sounds to me like Google’s way of pushing AdSense ads. After all, if they can kill the text link business, the world will have little choice but to go with a product like theirs for on site advertising. Being numero uno, they’ll rake in the cash at the expense of mom & pop web sites.

Sucks to me.

Hmmm, wait a minute. Let’s say someone sells a non-link-juice, redirected text link on their site, but writes an article on the site that includes a direct link to that same advertiser site. Will Google come down on them?

This could get interesting. Of course, I still think it sucks.