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!