My old school newspaper (the Daily Cal) is doing it, O’Reilly wittingly did it, and now Matt Cutts of Google has a post on why not to do it, or, if you are doing it for a good reason (say reputable traffic exchange, not PageRank inflation) then how to do it without penalty (use nofollow).
I don’t like nofollow, but spam screws up all sorts of things.
Fascinating comments under Matt’s post, BTW.
I posted this comment in Matt’s blog, but he promptly deleted it, probably due to his affiliation with Google.
I wonder if your blog can give it a light of the day:
I know of several startups who specialize in creating a MARKETPLACE for buying/selling links, with a promise of boosting the pagerank. Google is simply becoming too arrogant. I think those startups are actually rendering a socially useful service- they are undermining the looming Google’s internet monopoly.
Never buy text link ads it is a bad idea for alot of reason . Just biuld a great web site and the PR will come. Come to think of it though if it was not the the porn industry our search results would not be ad goog as they are today so maybe thi new link buying scheme will make it better in the future if they can fix the problem of detecting it on all levels.
if there is a way to get more search traffic people will do it. it seems to me matt cutts is anti-text ads because google isnt good enough to deal with them yet. especially text ads that do not span an entire site and are on sites with related content. search engines and optimizers have adversarial roles, this is just google doing what is best for them without looking like the bad guy.