Quote:
Originally Posted by cimmeronstudios
isn't that more because Google is a search engine providing results and if you look at the results page and cannot clearly tell which are PPC and which are NATURAL then yes, it's completely misleading, I get that.
that, to me, isn't the same as webmaster A getting $10/month to put a link to website B on their site...
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If site A puts a "correct link" on their page, marked as sponsored (for the humans) and passing through an interstitial or nofollowed (for the bots) then yes, that is very different. However, if site A puts a string of text saying "Hey, check out this <a>site</a>", then no, that is intentionally misleading. That link is there purely to deceive either the search engine or the consumer, and it does decieve both. As a visitor to site A, you as the consumer have no indication that there is a business relationship between site A and site B, and neither do the spiders.
Basically, the complaint against Google is that the PPC ads look deceptively like the organic ones, as you said. Well, plain text links are now used in such a way that they look like part of the site content. And that is pretty much the same thing.