How long will people be able to buy their way to the top of Google?

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Originally Posted by caringneo

This trend only stop when google starts giving equal importance to the content on page and probably some way of user rating (which google is already doing with iGoogle).

Or maybe actual surfer ranking based on SERP clicks.

Links in Google SERPs change on click
Google's onclick SERP tracking has been around for a long time. I think there was even a deconstruction of it on the WebmasterWorld few years ago.

Recently, they changed the redirects at /url to be client-side, rather than server-side, for a significant proportion of users - and went as far as announcing this publicly.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3918680.htm