Unless you’ve been smoking rocks or hiding under one, you’re probably well aware of Google’s current Netwide manhunt for sites that buy links to get a SERP advantage.   Here’s one of the more famous blowouts: izea’s payperpost.com program paid bloggers to blog about sponsors and linking to them without the no follow rel tag.  Result: Google struck back by reducing the participating blogs’ PR to 0.

Indeed, Matt Cutts has blogged and spoken quite a few times on the evil of selling backlinks.  We thought this was the Google official policy.  At least until we saw this Adsense ad when checking our stats in an online SERP checker tool:

Click the Thumbnail to view the large image

The problem with this is there’s no vetting whether the links being sold are merely submissions–which should be fine since the sites submitted to can still VOLUNTARILY post the link or deny it.  They are not getting paid either way.  You are paying for the submission service.  The problem is when people GUARANTEE a certain number of links.  Then the smell of either collusion or worse, being placed on a site’s own internal network, becomes overpowering.  We support submission services due to the voluntary placement explanation above.

What we don’t understand is why Google would take adwords ad placements for GUARANTEED links or ads that imply GUARANTEES such as the ad above without at least thinking of the implications regarding its avowed anti-linkselling policy.

What do you think?