Google has been going crazy with FUD about paid links, slapping some high profile sites and networks along the way. Matt Cutts recently posted about finding cloaked websites. Well Google great job at finding spammers, NOT!
I regularly reverse engineer peoples SEO. You have to admit it’s fun to tear apart someones linking strategy and then copy it analyse it. I pay particular interest to inbound links to sites for obvious reasons. I’m pretty sick of seeing inbound links appearing in noscript blocks that do not appear on the page (and I’m trying real hard not to out a couple a few examples). Especially as they seem to carry some weight and are passing on link juice. Using noscript for SEO is nothing new, it’s been used for yonks to to make spider readable content not appear to users .
So come on Google get wise to it. How hard can it be? All you have to do is discount a link if it doesn’t appear in the body of the page but does appear in the noscript block. Google should be concentrating less on FUD and Webmaster PR and more on solving problems with intelligent solutions.