See what happens when you take a couple of days off? A great discussion gets going and you get left out. It appears that Google’s Matt Cutts spent the weekend revisiting and addressing some concerns from webmasters dealing with paid links and alleged over-optimization penalties. If you can remember back to April, Cutts had several things to say about paid links… most notably that Google was apparently going to be cracking down on them.

On Saturday, Cutts added more information to that post. In particular, he had this to say:

• link sellers can loose trust with Google (which includes loosing their ability to pass along PageRank)
• paid links, paid reviews, etc should be discounted from the search engines on the owners site (using nofollows, robots.txt, etc); otherwise, Google might see that as a manipulation
• paid links that could incur penalties are those that try to “flow PageRank and game Google”
• paid links that offer no value to users, have nothing to do with your site, or otherwise appear anti-user are the type that will fall under Google’s crosshairs
• the reports requested back in April are being used to build up datasets, test algorithms, etc; but they are also being used to do manual investigations
• directories should be approached with caution - many have their link-passing abilities discounted

Between the update and the over 600 comments (at the time of this writing) there’s a ton of information in this post. But one of the things that stood out to me where Cutts’ comments on complaints that Google was trying to dictate policy to website owners.

He basically said site owners were free to do whatever they wanted with their sites… but Google was also free to do whatever it wanted with its index. No arguing that logic, right? Last time I checked, both of those statements are true.

So I guess the question you should really be asking yourself is simple: how bad do you want to be included in Google? If you don’t want to get the bump, follow their guidelines. If you could care less about Google… do your own thing.

On a different coin, Cutts also directed users in a forum discussion about the -950 “over optimization” penalty to a video he made back in August that talked about recent changes Google was making to its algorithm. Specifically, he pointed them to a segment in which he talks about why some people might be affected by the recent changes. He says that affected users are more likely to be reading in “SEO forums” and that, if their sites are being penalized, they should think of ways to “back off” the SEO a bit.

Is it a clear-cut signal saying that yes… Google does penalize sites with too much SEO? No. But is it pretty obvious that he’s saying just that? Yes it is.

So while you’re deciding how bad you want to be included in Google, you should also decide where the happy medium lies as far as your SEO tactics go. Not enough and you might not rank as well as you’d like… too much and it’s the same story.

Bottom line for both of these conversations is the same, though: build a website that PEOPLE want to use… build a website that makes sense for people… and you should be fine on all counts.