Paid Link Controversy

There has been a slew of blog posts and discussion in various forums on whether or not paid links are good or bad. Much of the recent rise comes from Jeremy Zawodny's experiment on selling links from his personal blog, and from Matt Cutt's recommendations for using "nofollow" tags.

Being the "high-profile" blog that it is, many feel that Jeremy is playing with fire by offering site wide text link ads - even though the ads themselves are "spam free" and somewhat "on-topic."

Personally I doubt any search engine will drop Zawodny's blog from its index. We are more likely to see Google de-value the sponsored links - as they have a history of doing so for other "high-profile" sites.

This debate actually hits pretty close to home for my company as we are one of the sponsors on Zawodny's blog. We recently contacted Jeremy, kindly asking him to add the "nofollow" tag to our link. Given the relevancy and natural anchor text, I personally thought it was unnecessary but I certainly understand that there is still that minute chance Google's algorithm won't just de-value the link, but penalize the sponsor as well. I know - sounds extremely paranoid but do we have any other choice? In this case, it seems that Google's answer for a flawed algorithm is the nofollow tag. What a pain in the ass!

Must. Find. Time.

.... to post on this blog.

Two holidays have past since my last entry so it's safe to say this little web log of mine has been neglected for some time now. So much so that I have been receiving sarcastic offers from colleagues to acquire this "dormant" destination. Now-now, I still plan on throwing up a few pearls - just not as frequently as before.

Anyway, a lot has happened in the past two months:

• We launched a new look and feel to the Best of the Web Directory as well as to the BOTW Blog.
• We've acquired the help of many more directory editors to add more resources and manage taxonomy.
• We've launched the BOTW Blog Directory - which I'm very excited about. Notice there is currently no search functionality (should be available within the next 45 days or so). Submissions to the blog directory are free but blogs must meet a strict set of criteria to be included. In other words, it's a splog free directory.
• Brian, Greg and I exhibited at the WMW Conference in Las Vegas.
• and most recently, we launched Best of the Web Media - a collection of blogs written by subject experts from all over the world.

Yep, lots of new developments and more to come...