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One of the more entertaining aspects of the entire paid links debate is Google is pretty quick to dole out the punishment, even though in many cases they haven’t taken the time to get their own house in order.

We’ve discussed the links to Golfballs.com on the Google checkout blog multiple times. At this point it pretty obvious Google has done some sort of manual adjustment as the page clearly isn’t passing any link juice. Why Google has chosen this route instead of any of the methods outlined in their webmaster guidelines remains something of a mystery.

We’ve also been assured that none of the links on these Google mini pages are influencing the algo or ranking in any way. Again curiously they’ve chosen not to implement any of the solutions spelled out in the webmaster guidelines.

Here’s a new one I stumbled across last week a list of Google Partners who have implemented Google Checkout all sitting on a nice PR8 page with straight links.

I’m sure someone from Google will be along shortly to tell us these links have been taken care of algorithmically and are not passing any juice or influencing the rankings in any way. Fine I’ll believe them.

However what I’d really like to know is why isn’t Google following their own recommendations and implementation suggestions for nofollows, redirects, and robots.txt. Should all 5000+ of my readers file spam reports that Google is selling text links? Could we reasonably expect that page to be banned from the index (please oh please that would so make my day).

How can Google the company who is attempting to dictate how the web should structured expect everyone else to comply with their guidelines when they are doing miserable job of following those same guidelines themselves? If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black I don’t know what is …

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