Ever since, in an article in his blog, Matt Cutts called for users to report sites that are obviously selling links via spamreport, opinions on this subject are flaring up in blogs and on forums: meddling, exploitation of a monopoly or the promotion of denunciators are only a few of the accusations which Cutts and Google are exposed to. Even though this problem is more complex than this and these Black/White-opinions are not helping the cause.

The Internet was a different one at the end of 1999, when Brin and Page, through their paper “ The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, laid the foundations for a new way of evaluating websites through external factors like quality and quantity of incoming links, which would later on become industry standard: Searchengines heeded to names like Fireball and evaluated the occurrence of the keywords in the file- as well as directorynames and the manipulation of the SERPs was a secret science which was only known in a small village on the right side of the Rhine, as least according to Telepolis.

In the past eight years Google has grown from a student project with a Lego-server to the dominant searchengine with about 10.000 employees and a more than 90% marketshare of the German searchmarket. The user count, which Google allocates, decides upon the future of whole companies and top-positions on a few keywords can quickly generate a lot of money. As a result, the sale and purchase of links – the currency on which Google bases their ranking – has matured from one-man-businesses to a real business-branch. Be it Text-Link-Ads in the USA or Linklift in Germany, the sale of links and the manipulation of the ranking-foundation of Google through it is wide-spread.

Just as with the automated linktrade-networks of the past, Google will take a look at this behavior for a while but they will start to intervene once it reaches a size where the foundation of the Googleranking could be affected. It seems that, at present, the purchase or respective sale of links in both the USA and Germany has reached this size and degree of professionalism: This is surely similar to a knightly accolade for the operators of these networks, who are making money on every deal, seeing that this is a threat to Google, whose core business is still the search – where the quality of the results is still the linchpin – which they have to counter. In the future, Google will therefore have to try and keep bought links out of the calculations which the SERPs are based on.

The argument that Google is meddling with the foundations of the Internet can be countered by noting that these links are not set because the site-operator recommends these sites out of interest but because he is getting paid to do so – the payments are important while the quality comes only secondary. Everyone is still free to set links however they see fit – what they can not do is expect a searchengine, whose primary goal is the quality of the results, to include the links or the linking sites into the process. To set up links that do not serve to manipulate the Google-SERPs, techniques such as the Nofollow-tag or the handling through JavaScript or an Adserver, which is blocked via robots.txt, are available.

We can not completely dismiss that Google is using its monopoly in the searchenginemarket – especially in large parts of Europe. If searchengines like Seekport or Exalead, both of whom have market shares in the low single digits, were to make such claims, it would probably be taken in as funny European folklore - the chance of being taken seriously on world-wide scale and therefore implementing the claims would be non-existing. Admittedly we have to keep in mind that Google is not a company who is devoted to a charitable common good, but which wishes to make a profit and in the searchenginemarket, that is achieved chiefly through the index quality – which MSN had to learn the hard way.

That Google is using webmaster Spam reports for the implementation, which means they are trying to use competitors of the buyers/sellers of those links, certainly leaves a moldy aftertaste. A company with the technical resources as well as their own spam-department in Dublin, who are trying to establish something similar in Germany, should exhaust internal possibilities first and only then should they go public with the results. We are left to hope that Cutts line does not correspond with the official Google-directive.