I have links that are paid and ones that are not paid, Google has no clue what so ever which are the paid ones 100% guaranteed
Blah, they can read basic CAPTCHA now I'd assume they can read "Sponsored ads" or tell where my signature is, the location of my footer, and know that a gambling site is not relevant to my gardening blog. Granted, it's easier to fool a robot, but that does take at least some effort. I think they are hoping for "best guess" not 100%, there will be collateral damage. The trick is making your paid links look like the free ones, and not the other way around
Well, please code one up - try it and get back to me. Natural language understanding is difficult and I think until you have sat down and tried to write a program to parse out a web page to determine the intent of links, you may not appreciate the difficulty.
Well they are trying Matt Cutt's mentioned something in his blog a while ago http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ i think at the moment they are trying to get webmasters to "tell" on other webmaters however, i wouldn't be suprised if they are developing a system right now to crack down on this.
The algo will probably pick out related words such as "advertise" etc, and give it less weight. That is the only way I can see it being possible. Remember, Google can not actually punish you for this. If this was the case, I would spend my time "punishing" competitors.
I don't need to write one up, I have a link: www.google.com Unless they are lying about everything else they've done in relation to links, then it's only a matter of time before they figure it out (assuming they haven't already). And now that they've brought it up and are asking people to be on the look out (to report paid links) they get to narrow their code parameters. I mean, if they code can read the text on a jpeg image, how hard would it be to pull 'Sponsored links' out of a nicely formated web page and then discount the links between that text & the end of the table/div or whatever?
Exactly - I obfuscate may pages to make it more difficult to relate links to intent - effectively neutralizing anything you may think that Google can do to predict whether a link was paid for or not.
Amen -- Perhaps it's a way to lock in advertising to Google only. Sure they play it off like they don't mind as long as... but look at the fear out there! They must eat this stuff up PEOPLE R Freakin! Just call me a PEON but it's true!