As long as it’s getting the money Google pays but lip service to the problem of sponsored links in its search results being all too often for scam websites which at best sell counterfeit goods or more likely take your money and fail to deliver anything at all.

In the words of Jaclyn Clarabut, of Which? Computing ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is’.

If it’s a sponsored link be it Google, MSN or AOL be on your guard it could be a fraud.

In 2006 Ben Edelman, an academic at Harvard University, conducted a study of the trustworthiness of sites with sponsored links at the five main search engines. He found that 5.93 per cent of Google’s sponsored links were untrustworthy, rising to 6.01 per cent for MSN and 7.2 per cent for AOL. This percentage increased for particular key words — 23.5 per cent of results for “digital music”, for example, were untrustworthy.

He concluded that search engine advertisements are “needlessly risky” and that consumers should simply click on the top free search result. Source: The Times.

And beware that these sites can look very professional indistinguishable from the real thing – it’s easy to say but always check a website before you use it for the first time. About.com has a pretty good guide aptly named Don’t be a sucker.

Meanwhile Google is collecting up to £5 a click a doing little other saying it doesn’t knowingly advertise these sites but claims it “can’t regulate the internet” and why it seems the vast profits it’s making from the scam don’t give it any inclination to solve the problem.