I’m sure you’ve all read by now about the controversy erupting across the web regarding Google and their seeming double standard toward paid links. There have been worrying comments from Matt Cutts about his seeming ability to read minds (akin to the Though Police in 1984); it’s not whether you get a paid link or not, it’s whether you intended to get a paid link.

This coupled with Google keeping a close eye on certain ‘high profile’ SEO individuals and agencies seems to be sending waves of paranoia and anger left right and centre. There have been a few extremely well written posts on the subject which I would highly recommend reading:

• Michael Gray over at Wolfhowl has posted about how he has personally experienced Google’s double standard on so called ‘paid linking’.
• Lisa Barone has also written a great post on this worrying profiling from Google and the potentail pitfalls of tarring everyone with the same brush.
• Rand Fishkin has in his usual clear style provided a summary of danger areas and what it’s like to work under the Eye of Sauron.

The Eye of Sauron, ever watchful for webspam...

It worries me that SEOs are being profiled by the webspam team at Google. This suggests that they already imagining us as an army of Black Hatted devils smearing tins of Tesco Smart Price spam all over the glistening Babylon of the internet that they have built.

I can understand them wanting to ensure that the web is full of good content and to ban the genuine spammers, however it’s going to require a more intelligent approach than ‘all SEOs are Black Hat – BURN THEM!’