Google about to crack down on paid links in Spain?

Image via CrunchBase

I've no inside knowledge on this one - expect for the fact that I'm just back from SMX Madrid. One of my take-away observations was that Google sent three engineers from the web quality team in Dublin to the event. Three. This isn't usual for Google. Each of them worked on Spanish web quality.

This observation entered my thoughts during an after event drink with Dr Pell from Microsoft/Powerset and the Googlers. Dr Pell was discussing the order in which Bing had looked at languages (and Bing is in Beta everywhere except the USA) and how Spanish had come late in the process. This wasn’t because Spanish was a low priority or hard – but because the linguist team considered it to be fairly easy and where confident to leave it to later. Googlers nodded.

Link buying is still fairly common in Spain (this contrasts to the United Kingdom where link buying has dramatically decreased). This is just a guess but the telltale signs seem fairly strong.