Struck the Sponsored Links Nerve, Did I?

Well, judging by the reaction to #1 In what is otherwise a pretty good summary over on SearchEngineWatch, Danny Sullivan says that I'm SEW Forum too. Tim Converse (of the Yahoo! Search Engineering Team) Part of what makes me wonder is the fact that these link brokers exist and seem to not be going out of business. What's behind it all? #2 Jarrod at TextLinkBrokers.com (hadn't heard of them until today) Links, Condoms, Shit and Fans we learn that I'm "essentially daring the engines to throttle his outflow of link juice." I assure you, if that was my goal I could have come up with a much more dramatic way of doing it. (No, I'd rather not explain what that might be.) But, hey, good attempt to make it look like I'm playing chicken with the folks in Mountain View or my co-workers. I'd give it a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. #4 The folks over at Best of the Web have They've changed their minds since in light of the recent discussion:

we have decided to ask Jeremy to add the rel="nofollow" tag. (I just received an email from Jeremy saying that he'd "rig up the code to do that within a day") In hindsight, we should have requested it from the beginning, and I hope that this is not now a case of closing the barn door after the cows have run out.

Advertisers discussing the thinking behind their choices and doing so in public? Nice. #5 Macalua.com is all about playing up the drama in #6 Over on Threadwatch we see that seobook (who I must assume is Google Fights Paid Links & Yahoo Defends Paid Links I said the following in his comments (which have some sort of posting delay, so I ended up making the same point twice):

Your title is just plain wrong. Making this out to be a "Yahoo vs. Google" think is barking up the wrong tree. And you know better. What I do on *my* personal site is my business. If I experiment, I experiment. I've been pretty open about this, past experiments, traffic sources, money sources, etc. It has nothing to do with Yahoo policy.

I'm pretty surprised that he did that, but he's also going for some drama points I guess. It's odd, because he specifically points out that this is a *personal* site in his post. His post also #8 There's a funny Greg Boser quote in the That reminds me of what I was thinking over two years ago when I wrote #8 Over on Wolf-Howl.com I read one of the more amusing titles: Text link follow-up, Matt Cutts (of Google) digs into what the links link to and was the one to uncover the Lesbian Gay Sex Positions site. Luckily he does this stuff for a living, so he can call it "work." :-) He also suggests that I could offer flying lessons to my 10,000th visitor. I'd need to get my CFI certificate first, but you never know... Gimme a couple more years. There's some amusing theories, wild speculation, and even a few insightful comments in the discussion on his post too. Give 'em a read for what both sides think. Matt is wise not to respond to those asking him if AdSense is providing most of the motivation for folks who want higher ranks and resort to various tactics to get it. There are mines in that field! #10 Over on the ink-stained banana, JR (a co-worker) Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Jeremy Zawodny's blog