Matt Cutts of Google had an interesting blog post over the past weekend that specifically talks about reporting paid links to Google. (Hat tip, Jody) Apparently many people out there feel that paid links are just another form of spam that Google should penalize when it come to natural rankings.

To this end, Cutts hinted that Google may develop a special form for reporting competitor’s paid links so that Google can identify and punish websites that use this tactic to gain page rank and natural rankings. Most distressing, is that Cutts is calling on webmasters and marketing to report paid link “transgressions” so that Google may, “augment our existing algorithms”.

While I am all for algorithm tweaks, I believe this initiative is fraught with peril. My first thought when reading this post was, “Great! Now I can simply buy a paid link for a competitor and then report them in the spam report!” This practice would be a far cheaper and faster way to increase the natural rankings of our clients. Why spend all the time and effort attempting to SEO a client’s site when you can simply buy a link for $50, point to a competitor, report them to Google, and let Google knock them down in the SERP.

I’m thinking of calling this subtraction by addition: Decrease a competitor’s ranking by adding link to their site. And what about the hypocrisy involved with Google being able to sell links (AdWords) and buy links (AdSense & Search Bars) to monetize their website, but now they have the audacity to want to punish webmasters and companies who simply wish to do the same thing. Namely, profit from the equity they built in running a successful website.

But let’s step away from the obvious pitfalls associated with this half- baked idea and talk about some other Google issues that should be rectified long before they think of working on this newest obsession.

First, how about getting the original Spam report process to work correctly? For every 100 sites reported it is probably fair to say that perhaps 1 or 2 are ever punished. Shouldn’t Google get this Spam report process to work efficiently before adding yet another component to it? As you will soon read, I don’t like this reporting practice at all to begin with, but the only thing I like less than a bad idea, is a bad idea poorly implemented.

Second, the Page Rank Algorithm itself. Google created this paid link monster themselves by placing a tremendous emphasis on backlinks in their SERP algorithm. They also made a toolbar that displays Page Rank for any website you visit, highlighting the importance of Page Rank in gaining SERP.

So basically Google says Page Rank is important when it come to natural rankings, and to get better Page Rank, you should get more backlinks, and they identify the best pages to get backlinks from by displaying a page’s Page Rank.

What exactly did they think any SEO marketer was going to make of that equation? Could it be that SEO marketers might start looking for a way to get backlinks from high Page Ranks sites/pages? And what about the owners of high Page Rank sites? Could it be they saw an opportunity to profit from external links once a deluge of link requests started coming in from the SEO marketers? It would seem to me that this is a classic case of cause & effect that somehow eluded all the geniuses in the Google think tank.

Finally, my biggest complaint is with Google relying on other people to police their own rankings. My position would be that if Google cannot police their own search engine rankings, then they shouldn’t rely on people with ulterior motives to do it for them. If Google’s search engine rankings become nonsensical or bogus due to a poor algorithm, that is Google’s fault and people will eventually turn to other search engines who can provide better rankings, and hence, better search results.

By allowing, and in fact, encouraging this SERP secret police reporting nonsense, they are allowing the inmates to run the asylum. I mean, exactly how many of the spam reports submitted to Google are altruistic reports that have no effect on the reporter’s own SERP? My guess would be somewhere between slim and none and slim left town about 5 years ago.

The only reason anyone reports another site for spam is to gain SERP at the expense of someone else losing it. Google has plenty of resources (read:money) to investigate the results of their own search engine algorithm, which is the basis for their perceived integrity. If Google does not have the time or inclination to find and remove spamming websites from their index, why should I or anyone else be motivated to do it for them unless there is the potential for me to profit from it?

Let’s put the burden back on Google to maintain their SERP algorithm so that it produces the best search results possible and let’s judge Google as a search engine based on the result they produce, and not their suspiciously motivated users report.