How stupid can Google make you?

A lot of people believe that Google started to penalize sites that sell links. Partially, that might be so, but only to a minutia of an extent. If you put yourself in Matt Cutts’ shoes, you must ask yourself a lot of questions along these lines: “what is the worst thing for a search engine? How to prevent spam on the net in general? How to detect spam that soils serps and overshadows valuable pages?, etc”
The job that Matt Cutts took upon himself is to find all the garbage on the net that Google doesn’t want to identify with. Search engine manipulation is what Google doesn’t want. But not all manipulation is bad. If NASA wants to promote their website using some questionable techniques, it is not necessary evil. After all, the user will get so-called “positive user experience”, because he/she will find good articles on the subject they were searching for. The problem appears only when Internet spammers use the same techniques to promote websites that are of zero value to the end user. How to stop that promotion and how to identify worthless sites is the primary objective. If you are willing to pay to promote you website a considerable amount of money, I would argue that your site is of some value. In addition, sites selling links (pr 7 pr8 and up) usually don’t accept poor quality websites of controversial nature. Selling links may not be that bad after all, but there is nothing wrong with disseminating misinformation that Google will penalize such a practice. As a result, webmasters will pay more attention to the quality of sites they decided to link to. The problem that Google has at the moment is not paid links but various link exchange systems. They are very effective in promoting spam and webmasters have little control over who they actually link to. Matt Cutts screaming left right and center about paid links is actually a smoke screen to divert your attention from the fact that Google is focusing on their worst problem: promotion of websites via systems that are cheap, fast, and effective. You have to know the mechanism of these systems to understand the problem. It doesn’t cost you much to gather a significant number of points that can be exchange for links. Gents, this is spam and not paid links!