In my opinion this is a good example of how Google one more time is running "informational wars".

I remember ~ 2 years ago the panic: "My God, Google slaps for paid links!" and other stuff being heavily discussed. Sometimes it looked to me that some people were ready to commit suicide, judging by the doomsday tone of their posts about this topic.

So what?

If I am not mistaken some sites were publicly nailed down and "decapitated", some stupid link services kicked into the b*tt. Most of the paid link services are ok up to now.

The only real effect was that a portion of people got scared by the official Google threats to punish for paid backlinks. I agree, that was a smart step to run a fear campaign and scare people off from buying backlinks, good job. The people who did the media component of this informational war should get yachts as bonuses for a great job.

Has anything changed this time?

I don't know - I am not Google. But I assume that it is not easy to catch paid backlinks algorithmically.

"Report a paid link service" feature - well, I don't know. Webnauts in some of the recent posts on WPW quoted an article with answers from Google team and the answer to this question was something like 'yes we see you all', so what?

I assume that algorithmically it is possible to catch some primitive link brokers with packs of junk links in the footer. Or link farms.

But not real backlinks, otherwise Google will have to close the whole net.

Bottom line: my personal opinion - this is the sequel of informational wars about paid links. Once again we will see some "public executions" done by Google. Once again the masses will be creating thousands of forum threads about it. Once again - the majority of paid link services will survive.

Real life will show whether my point of view is correct or not. As WPW stores the info for a long time, let's get back to my words in a year - after the media part of informational war gets calmed down.

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