The New York Times recently posted an article about how major floral distributors are suspected of purchasing links with the text phrase “Mother’s Day Flowers” to increase their PageRank in Google search queries. Mother’s Day remains one of the best business days of the year for sites like 1-800 Flowers and it seems the companies looked for any advantages they could take in search results, including those outside of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

While Google has not penalized these sites, the company’s stance on purchased links has been clear since 2007. Webmasters should use the “nofollow” tag and “noindex” tags on paid links.

In the past 4 years, it seems much has changed. While link farms have always been expressly taboo, a proliferation of new paid programs like Sponsored Tweets and Izea offer businesses a chance to purchase tweets, YFrog videos, images and checkins. Basically, it’s distributed link farming.

Most of these programs abide by the “nofollow” tags, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t unofficial programs aimed at creating the illusion of reputation and followers. And it’s reputation and followers that (as discussed in the video above by search lead Matt Cutts) allow Tweets to surface in results.

For example, there are more than 40 million results for the search query buy Twitter followers and half a million results for auto retweet bot. While these tools are more likely being employed to drive referrals directly to a site itself, the added SEO bonus of linking may also play a part in why these tactics are so popular.

While Google will never be able to stop meritless reputation inflation altogether, it’s interesting to conceptualize the points of data that can make or break publishing companies, e-commerce sites and many other web-based businesses.

For more info on Twitter and Google Page Rank, check out Technology Review’s article on How Google Ranks Tweets or check out this post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog about Link Farms >