Sponsored Links Update

Well, the last month has been entertaining and educational. After a month of having paid text link ads on my site, I've taken them down--just as tuning in late: The big controversy comes from the fact that one is "selling PageRank" rather than forcing publishers to earn it through good content, lots of links, and all that other stuff it takes. The search engines (one of which I work for) would rather that paid links be tagged with a rel="nofollow" attribute to indicate that any "link juice" or authority shouldn't be passed on to that site. Now here's the thing that surprises me. There are many folks out there who don't care about buying PageRank, link juice, authority, or whatnot. Given the chance to buy a link that's been tagged with nofollow, they're willing to do so. In other words, some of the folks buying links really do see them as advertisements not just a way to "cheat" Google. They simply wan exposure. I know this because some of them have Matt Cutts (without the "www" for those of you playing along at home; if you don't know why that's amusing, don't worry). Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Yahoo! Search blog as well.