This stance is really a passionate one!

The issue here is who is doing the selling? Or rather, who is getting paid. Jeremy is doing the selling directly so the money goes to his pocket. But if Jeremy used AdWords, then Google is selling links and the money goes to their pocket first.

The bigger question becomes, what does Google ultimately value more? Natural listings or paid?

I’m struggling to find the right analogy with which types of old-school media advertising we find appropriate and which we find inappropriate. Paying the New York Times to run a favorable op-ed piece? Clearly inappropriate. Running a large, clearly-labeled ad on the op-ed page of the New York Times? No one seems to mind. Clearly there are nuances in this business. So condemning the selling of page rank as inherently wrong seems a bit overzealous.

Remember that Google makes their money by selling text ads. The fact is that text links are a great advertising method, and they will not be stopped. Fact 2 is that google really has no way of determining a paid text link from a friendly link for the vast majority of cases.

My worry is that Google is close to following the maxim: “Extremism in the defense of the Google Algorithm is no vice!” I hope this is not true.

Sure, you can EXECUTE people for running a stop light (or kill sites for selling or buying links), and this will reduce violations, but this type of harsh penalty distorts things in very unnatural ways.

Also it’s just … evil …Google, please don’t be evil.

Y’all sure you aren’t arguing over tulips?

Travel agents may include links to various Convention and Visitors Bureaus, hotels and attractions to highlight a region’s offerings. A vertical shopping sites might highlight other larger shopping destination and use some affiliate program, or may just do it for good will (see “Miracle on 34th St.” for a Web 0.0 example).

I guess my problem is that as far as the search engine goes, there’s no way for them to know why a given link exists on a page, nor should they. If there’s any sort of attribute that need be applied to such an item, it’s the responsibility and discretion of the site owner to do so. Would Jeremy or anyone else be dinged for not including a NOFOLLOW tag for items he links to in his articles?

Whatever “issues” a site uses does not mean that the linking site is any LESS RELEVANT for the keywords it is coming up on in the SERPs.

Why should searchers SEARCH harder than they have to, to find the most relevant listing for their queries. It is not fair to them, also it is eating up unnecessary bandwidth of Google.

So, the Linking sites should ONLY be judged on how RELEVANT they are for a keyword query.

The LINKed-TO site is another matter altogether;
just tweak the ALGOs, so that practices Google feels are distorting the relevancy of potential SERPs are neutralized.

But the only criteria should be: DOES IT DECREASE THE RELEVANCY!!!

What difference is it when one has a repectable PageRank - AND LINKS INTERNALLY (thereby transferring the PR to the other Webpages on that site)?

There is nothing inherently wrong with selling PageRank if a site is reviewed thoroughly and seen as offering a valid service or product,… as opposed to selling blindly to to the highest bidders!!!

When deciding on policies – the prestige of the site doing the linking should be factored-in.

A very prestigous site, that need vital income to continue offering HIGH QUALITY, will probably be VERY discriminating about the quality of their links.

You can not get too much traffic from any site, Except a directory, because WHY WOULD A COMMERCIAL SITE WANT TO HAVE USERS CLICK AWAY TO ANOTHER SITE — So selling the PageRank may be what makes the Text Link buyers spend their cash.

Text Links are subtile – if you really wanted traffic – would you NOT insists on Flash or DHTML effects to get attention and pique curiosity????