In Paid Links are Not SPAM if They Pay Per Click Arron Wall shows he has no love lost for Google; Matt Cutts of Google suggested that Topic Link Baiting is a useful search marketing strategy at Search Engine Strategies this week in San Jose.

The reasons search engineers advocate link baiting are:

• it is expensive
• it is time consuming
• the results are hard to predict
• it requires social connections
• it provides off topic low value traffic
• it typically creates content of limited commercial value (other than the ability to pull in links to rank other pages for stuff they did not have enough relevancy or authority to merit ranking for)
• the valuable results can take a while to show
• it often undermines the credibility of the source doing it (by allowing people to think of information from certain sources as link bait, which is a derogatory classification term)
• many companies have restrictions that prevent them from doing it

Because of the above reasons, the technique of link baiting is outside the reach of most webmasters. Since few people can do it, it is highly unpredictable, time consuming, and expensive OF COURSE that is the only way search engineers recommend you build links. They might even like you to believe that almost all links are acquired that way. The more brutally tough it is to build your SEO strategy the more appealing AdWords ads look.

Arron gets even more upset over Google's selective policing that is making them sound more and more like Yahoo.  In fact, Arron Wall thinks the fight over search spam has NOTHING to do with result relevancy. The label of spam is only applied if the wrong company gets paid. According to SeoBook: "..When Google engineers lie publicly to push their business model it doesn't bode well for the future of that company or the future of the web.

"..It gets worse when you think about the uneven policing of the search results, where engineers hand edit small webmaster sites out of the search results (even ones that get free unrequested links from the US Coast Guard and US embassy), and look the other way while large corporations (which have large AdWords budgets) OWN the entire Google search result page for some keywords.

…If it is Google getting paid, feel free to sell high yield investment scams, or preteen sex ads. They have no problem syndicating those messages all over the web, as long as they are getting paid. "