Google Paid Links Reporting Tool

[Chris]

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?hl=en

Always, the greatest risk with using a blackhat technique is not being caught by an algorithm, but being reported by a competitor.

[Mike]

By the looks of things, they're not going to manually penalize specific sites based on what is submitted through that form. Instead, it seems they'll be just using the information to tweak their algorithm...

[Cutter]

But if they aren't manually penalizing whats preventing false reporting?

[Chris]

They're not taking any direct action, one would guess.

I imagine they just want examples to feed to new algorithms they're testing. Throw the sites reported at the algorithms and see how they work to devaluing the links or penalize the sites.

[rpanella]

What's to stop spammers from mass submitting legitimate competitors sites though in order to confuse the algorithm? I'm sure Google has thought about this and has counter measures in place, but it seems like without doing any type of manual checking of the submissions, it leaves it open for abuse.
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Suzuki k125

[Chris]

Oh I'm sure they'll manually go over them, just not to the point of issuing manual penalties perse.

[Selkirk]

What's interesting to me is that they are asking for both ends of the relationship in a way that can go into their database. I bet they have a viewer app that can prioritize their investigations by the most frequently mentioned buyers and sellers.