Avoid Paid Posts - So Official It Hurts (Or Should Do)

Don't you just love those people that start businesses based on a misunderstanding of Google's T&C's or at least don't modify them as they change?

Going back over Matt Cutt's presentation "Straight from Google: What You Need to Know" (.ppt) there's a slide (44) that is entitled "Avoid paid posts" - how much more obvious does it need to be? But if you still can't grasp the concept here's the slide:



But what does "spam" mean and what does "not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites" mean? To my mind it's a bit too muddy for my liking.

If people take the "spam" element as content that is completely, or largely unrelated to the theme of the site the "content for links" sits on then there are a number of people that should be VERY worried!

And what's more, the declaration element is getting even fuzzier when you consider that Matt allegedly dumped Shoemoney on Twitter for a paid-per-tweet. As a side note, I did think Shoemaker's reply a bit childish!