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!