I just read Phil Ringnalda's blog post accusing publishing house O'Reilly of being a search engine spammer, along with all the ensuing comments (many of them critical of Phil's position). Wow, does Phil need to get off his high horse:

How horribly low have we sunk, that I'm not willing to link to O'Reilly sites without a rel="nofollow", because they are a bunch of low-life search engine spammers? X-bloody-ML.com, something that I won't touch without a nofollow condom? This just sucks.

I like what commenter hibiscusroto had to say to Phil in response:

I wonder if you'd pay for ad-free access to the O'Reilly sites? If you were in charge of the company would you still poo-poo the ads? And lastly, "punch the monkey and win a free X-Box!!!"

So where's the line in link advertising? Is it when it's off-topic? A "Punch the Monkey and Win" banner is off-topic as much as a "Cuban cigars" text link ad is, so relevancy of the ad can't be the criteria for which to judge whether the link ad is ethical or not. I think the line is here: Is the text link MISLEADING, DECEPTIVE or MISREPRESENTATIVE? Consider, for example, these cases:

1. Setting the ad's link text to some keyword-rich phrase that doesn't accurately reflect the page that is linked to.
   e.g. An ad on SeacoastOnline.com proclaims "The North Face" but that isn't The North Face!
2. Linking the ad text to a landing page that is built for search engines and not for people.
   e.g. the "Discount Vacations" example in my last post.
3. Hiding or obscuring the link so human visitors can't see it, only search engines.
   e.g. Doing a "View Source" on the home page of PRNewswire.com reveals these hidden links:
   
</noframes>
<a xhref="http://www.icrossing.com" mce_href="http://www.icrossing.com" >Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a xhref="http://sev.prnewswire.com" mce_href="http://sev.prnewswire.com" >Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>
</frameset>


This sort of stuff needs to be cleaned up. Otherwise unwitting ad buyers will pay the price for the website owner's past linking mistakes. Let's hope the text link ad industry steps in here with some self-regulation — some guidelines or standards or something!

Following on from yesterday's post on link buying and how it's a legitimate practice in many circumstances...

I found a blog comment posted just a few days ago by Google engineer Matt Cutts (yes, I've been blogging a lot about him lately... honestly, I'm not a groupie!). Matt chimed in on a lively debate happening on Tim O'Reilly's blog about the controversy surrounding the selling of link ads on the O'Reilly Network. Matt had this to say:

As others have noted, if you're going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links.

Tim points out that these these links have been sold for over two years. That's true. I've known about these O'Reilly links since at least 9/3/2003, and parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months. Remember that just because a site shows up for a "link:" command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext.

Google's view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda's. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page.

So here's Google coming out and admitting that they decreased the voting power of O'Reilly sites like perl.com and xml.com and downgraded the reputation value of some of their outbound links. And if you don't want your site to suffer the same fate, you'd better tag your link ads with rel=nofollow so they don't gain any PageRank. How do you like them eggs!

To me, that doesn't seem quite fair to website owners. They work hard to build a content-rich destination site with good PageRank score. Google is diminishing their earning ability by insisting they cut off the flow of PageRank with a nofollow, thus decreasing the value of the link ads to the advertiser and ultimately the revenue likely to realized from that advertiser. Granted, you don't buy links merely for PageRank, but of course it figures into the equation.

The problem lies in which link ads to vouch for. If I were the advertising manager for DailyItem.com, I certainly would not vouch for the advertiser of "Discount Vacations", as the link points to a "doorway page" operated by Orbitz that links to a whole pile of other doorway pages (tsk tsk! Google warns against using doorway pages); on the other hand, I would vouch for the "Dancewear" advertiser, since that's the company's name and the link points to the home page of their ecommerce site.

Google, please give the website owner the option of vouching for some of their advertisers without demoting their site. A black-or-white approach just isn't practical here. Signed, a devoted Google fan.