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Re:It's Time For Google To Take A Stand On Paid Links by halo on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:13PM (#814362)
Perhaps Google already algorithmically detects and quietly penalises such link-farming, or has tweaked their algorithm to minimise its impact. From their quality guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...):

Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Re:It's Time For Google To Take A Stand On Paid Links by dejb on Wednesday September 09, 2009 @09:31PM (#814391)
I'll bet they do but they can only detect the most obvious cases. It would be possible for website to sell links that even a human couldn't identify as sold, so there are limits to what their algorithms could achieve.