Paid Links: Please Inform Google

If ever there was an admission of algorithm failure it is this, Matt Cutts is asking folk to report sites that provide "paid links" (not any different to what Yahoo Directory provides....):

"Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid link"

Ultimately there is no way of "knowing" that a link is paid for, and attempts by Google to try and guess where this is the case could easily fail. It looks like the main flaw in Google's "link voting" basis is starting to become an irritation - Google is unable to judge if a report is fair or deliberately false - Google could never automatically detect paid links unless they were promoted using specific keywords from that site.

If a link to my site appeared on Google's home page, you might assume that it was paid for, but no algorithm could prove it.