Johannes Beus

Just as Cutts indirectly announced a few days ago, there is now, besides the “classic” spamreport, a
possibility in the Google-webmaster-tools to report sites that sell links. The function is framed by lots of dramatic text but we can assume that this feature will quickly generate a large number of reports. What is interesting here is that sellers as well as buyers (!) are asked to be named. If Google, after month of saber-rattling, should proceed to actually do an intervention, it begs the question if sellers, buyers or both sides of the deal will get harmed. Up until now it was so that only the site linking would be punished since, otherwise, there would be a possibility to harm unpopular competitors by purchasing links for them.