In last week’s post - Money can’t buy you link love – I asked the question that was on the minds of many webmasters - What will Google do when we report a link as a paid link?

Well, we have an answer… Google plans on using the information supplied by you (the average user), and testing their new algorithm to better identify and deal with paid links (so does this mean that they can’t pick them up themselves anymore?).

So there you go. Question solved… <pause> <pause> <pause>
NOTTTTTTT!!!

Matt Cutts has been avoiding the most important part of the question… What do you plan to do with theses links?

One of two things:
1). Discredit the link
Google decides to remove the link and basically handle it as a nofollow command. Nothing too bad, should keep the people happy that buy links for traffic.

2). Penalise the site
Google feels that you should clearly mark your paid links as a nofollow. So if you ignore it, then you create extra work for them (That would P… me off). Then the only way to force you to follow their rules, are by way of penalty. It’s the universal law – keeps us from speeding or breaking the law.

* Synonym for Discredit – Harm/Damage the reputation of

But, we’ll always have AdWords to spend money on…