Google to enter Paid Reviews thru AdSense?

Nah, I don’t believe it. Google is against paid reviews, right? Shoemoney got an emailing that Google is doing a beta test for paid reviews via AdSense.

We’ve witness the crusade against paid reviews by Google in the last couple of months. Why now would it enter into paid reviews itself? Google Search Quality Engineer Matt Cutts explained this before.

Shoemoney thinks the idea might make sense:

• Publishers – Google already has a amazingly huge database of publishers.
• Advertisers – Nobody has no online advertisers then Google AND now they they have taped into the news, magazine and radio network they have access to tap even more advertisers on the shoulder to pay for reviews of their service.
• Blogger – Google already owns the biggest blog network in the world and they seem to already have a relationship with wordpress for easy implementation of Google AdSense on wordpress.com (that would make sense anyway).
• Metrics – Between Google toolbar, Adsense, and Pagerank data Google has by far the best metrics to price a site for a review. They already use these metrics for Adwords in selling contextual ads and links.

Commenters on Shoemoney’s blog says this is a monopolistic nature of Google which it has shown recently — killing link selling competitors to AdSense and benefiting from that same market. IMO, this move could either strike at the credibility of Google or totally straighten up how paid reviews should be done and make it completely legit.

A Googler responds to this and denies anything resembling paid reviews: “In terms of a paid review service through AdSense, I certainly haven’t heard of any such product. I’ve done some searching around the web and found some speculative reports that were the first I’d heard of this product.”

Maybe, this is just a flat out rumor.