Google announced today they will begin providing a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools, in addition to its spam reporting form. This is one of those hot button issues we've covered here before but it certainly looks now like Google is taking a very staunch stance against the practice of buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation.

Google will review each report and use the feedback to improve its algorithms and improve search results. If you are selling links for advertising purposes, Google recommends adding a no follow tag (rel="nofollow") to the href tag or redirecting links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file.

While for many this will only cause confusion and problems (for example trying to identify what's a paid link and when's a paid link appropriate) it will most likely result in more "natural" search results pages for competitive search terms and phrases.

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