Just like the new large employer that moves into your town, Google has spawned many new cottage industries, and in some cases, caused many already existing companies to grow exponentially in an attempt to get webmasters better placement in the worlds most popular search engine.

SEO companies which have pretty much been around since the beginning of the internet as we know it, have sprouted up by the 10’s of thousands, all promising to get your site better visibility on Google. Figuring out Google’s algorithm, has been the subject of constant conjecture and experiments, and as soon as someone gets a leg up, Google turns around and changes things in an attempt to keep things exciting. Who could forget the Jagger Update awhile back?

Matt Cutts, Google employee, and unofficial blog mouthpiece for the goings on at the company has posted about what could be the next big change to throw a monkey wrench in another cottage industry born out of the quest for rankings on Google.

One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.

So what’s this all about?

As far as the details, it can be pretty short. Something like “Example.com is selling links; here’s a page on example.com that demonstrates that” or “www.shadyseo.com is buying links. You can see the paid links on www.example.com/path/page.html” is all you need to mention. That will be enough for Google to start testing out some new techniques we’ve got

If I am reading this correctly, Google is testing ways to determine which links are paid and which are not. Why? Well Cutts, as usual, is very cryptic in his explanations but the speculation by many is that Google is working towards devaluing paid links somehow as they believe that buying links, especially for the sole purpose of gaining PR juice or ranking advantages is a big no-no.

Of course missing from Cutts’ post, though brought up many times in the comments is how Google brought this upon themselves in the first place when they developed that little green bar and then used that calculation as part of their overall search algorithm so in other words, the more backlinks you have to your site, the more green appears in the toolbar and in many cases, the better you rank.

Now that this has become very well known in the webmaster community, another cottage industry has been gaining momentum. The buying and selling of links has been around forever as well, in the old days it was mainly a form of advertising used to generate traffic but in the past 4-5 years buying links in an effort to gain advantages in the search engines has overtaken the advertising merits. Why advertise on one related site that might get you a few hundred hits a week when you can buy space on a few non-related high PR sites which in turn could eventually lead to number 1 ranking on Goggle that could get you 10’s of thousands of hits a week?

Of course the company whose motto is “Do no evil” can’t have someone making money off of their search algorithm, and of course the current amount of real spam sites ranking high on their site is so minuscule that there is no need to focus on that so what are the engineers being tasked with doing? In this case it looks like they are going after another industry that wouldn’t have existed in the first place if it wasn’t for them.

What will this eventually lead to? Only time will tell and according to Cutts, Google has nothing against buying advertising on other sites as of course Google makes zillions doing just that, as long as it’s sole purpose is for generating traffic and not for manipulating search results. How will Google be able to tell which are paid and which are not? That’s the $64,000 question, but java redirects and the “nofollow” tag could become much more popular in the future and buying and selling of links could become much less popular unless you are someone with tons of traffic to offer.

So again, Google’s motto holds true, as long as your one of the big boys…