You know there’s a weeklong “paid links” debate that Matt Cutts started last month … nice link bait and a couple of people gotten pretty frigthened…

Sorry, I’m just too lazy to link to all those posts pro & contra, but somethink made me think today.

The sweepstake for my survey on online community motivation research that I run on Digitalpoint gives away text links and presell pages that you would have to pay $4,500 for, unless you win one of the prizes.

So,

1. they do have an incentive for participating in the survey (after allyou have to click thru those 25 questions)

2. they would HAVE TO be paid, normally – but they are not

3. the links you win will still be suject to manual review and approval by the brokers Text-Link-Ads and PresellPageMan

Are these essentially “paid links” in Google speak?

What’s your take on this?

Just because others pay $4,500 – you might not… How does Google tell the difference?