That might be the ideal result, but it's hard to see how anyone could achieve it with a purely automated system. To make the kinds of distinction you're describing, in general you probably need some form of manual curation by genuine experts with uncontroversial opinions, assuming such people even exist in the field of interest.
How do you feel about Google sponsoring educational seminars for market regulators where they do not disclose their sponsorship, actively conceal it, and request the entity putting on the sponsorship do the same thing?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transfo...
It is also worth mentioning that when Google was lobbying against regulation they indeed DID control & manipulate the placement of favorable media masquerading as regular content:
"the staff and professors at GMU’s law center were in regular contact with Google executives, who supplied them with the company’s arguments against antitrust action and helped them get favorable op-ed pieces published, according to the documents obtained by The Post."
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Another thing with the line of thinking based on pureness...should companies which have repeatedly been caught rigging actual physical markets (e.g. municipal bonds, California energy, LIBOR, interest rate swaps, forex, etc.) in the real world get a penalty by Google for it?
Or is it reasonable that they take their outsized gains from their market rigging behavior & invest some small portion of it into buying out smaller competitors, lobbying & writing regulations to harm smaller competitors, buy some feel good brand ads & do various charity donations to paint a picture of themselves?
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I also want to quote the following past statement from a Google executive about the AdWords ads Google puts directly in the search results:
"As with all of our policies, we do not verify what these sites actually do, only what they claim to do."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/google-faces-new-pres...
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and, some icing on the cake, ... ;)
check out the keyword rich deep links to some of Google's affiliate offers on BeatThatQuote.com (for credit cards, car insurance, etc.)
Google bought BTQ & then put a bunch of cross-site keyword rich deep links on it. is that natural? how is that any different than buying links?
The situation you mentioned can start out as innocuous but quickly become downright shady. Hmm, you're asking them to link to you, but what do they get in return? Oh, here's a thought, you tell them you'll link to them as well if they link to you, that way you'll both get a ranking bump! Totally fair and win-win for everyone except for the people who are trying to get quality information.