Protecting Your Links from Spying Eyes

There's been a lot of furor in the industry recently over Matt Cutts' blog post about hunting down paid links. While neither Matt nor Google have been forthcoming about what exactly they plan to do with that data, folks like Marketing Pilgrim's Jeremy Luebke are stepping up to offer some suggestions on how to keep your competitors from tracking down your incoming links.

From Jeremy's post:

Jeremy goes on to offer two quick suggestions for accomplishing the suggested link flood.

In the meantime, you'll have to continue to decide how you wish to play the game yourself. My gut says that these days Google tends to put more effort into discounting things instead of directly penalizing, but I can also understand the paranoia and fear of small businesses that are worried about dealing with penalties simply because they are selling or buying links as a form of advertising.

I can tell you that I haven't changed the way I do business (which does include some buying and selling of links for the advertising value) but that doesn't mean that I won't somewhere down the line if Google's intentions become known.