Adam Lasnik and I spoke about paid links, duplicate content and more late last week. The paid links conversation was very interesting. One of the things that Adam made clear is that Google is not looking to detect 100% of paid links. Their focus is much more on the links that are being sold for the purpose of passing PageRank.
We also talked about how the authenticated spam report form is going to be used. It turns out that this will not be used to decide on immediate penalties for sites that get reported. The information is simply going to be used for input into the search quality team at Google. Great news for webmasters who were worried about getting reported, as no immediate action will be taken.
Not so good news for those who want to level the playing field with competitors that are getting away with murder. Resolving those issues will still require patience.
There is a ton of good discussion in here about duplicate content, and other aspects of SEO too. Check this great interview with Adam out.
