Google wants you to tattle on people’s links!

Google would like us to pretend we are in the third grade and they are the teacher. That’s an apt analogy for paid link reporting being added to Google’s webmaster tools as third graders love to tattle.

And I quote:

Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRankâ„¢” in the form of paid links to their sites. ……… If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below.

In my opinion, Google must not be a very good teacher if they have to ask the students to tattle on one another. Matt Cutts has been hinting that Google is working on determining when and where paid links are being used. He has warned that there will be repercussions to those sites that are buying and/or selling them. If Google has faith in their ability to find paid links why would they need tattlers? It seems to me they wouldn’t.

When you think about it Google created the paid links economy when they created their algorithm to count links as votes from one site to another. In other words, Google created the paid links “mess” and now they want us to help clean it up. When did we start working for them?

Worst of all this would seem pretty easy for people to exploit for their own purposes. You encourage students to tell the teacher on their classmates and guess what, some of them will do so for reasons that are not altruistic. “Hey, bobby has a site ahead of mine, but i think those look like paid links, I bet the teacher should know about it.” Matt has said that Google works really hard to not let competitors hurt each other but what’s to keep someone from buying links for a site other than their own and reporting it?

Call me a cynic, but this is a plan that needed further maturation before it was thrown out to the webmaster community. For all the bright people Google hires I don’t see how no one saw this as a bad idea. Sorry, put me down as a “no” for tattling on anyone’s paid links.