Administrator

There's an interesting debate started by Jeremy Zawodny:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/

and it involves Matt Cutts of Google as well
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

JZ started accepting paid links. Some are relevant to his site. Some aren't. He hasn't put nofollow on his paid links but did label them as sponsored.

I find the whole thing interesting because we've site targetted him via adsense in the past (Lots of impressions, no clicks). And if he'd have had a link with rates or contact form we'd have inquired about advertising on his site (since we lost lots of momentum following our big crash).

He wrote a book about MySQL and is a respected Yahoo employee. I think his site is perfectly relevant to ours. Yet, with the way Google handles paid links, I think I'd follow the lead of another advertiser who asked JZ to add a nofollow attribute.

Why? Well even though it is a relevant link, the fact is the section is labelled as sponsored and who knows how Google feels about sponsored text links today or tomorrow. We only want the traffic because it's relevant.

Which makes me think, the nofollow attribute is useless. Most people don't even know about it or understand it. And many spammers probably devote a lot of time to exploiting it.

Further, why is Google pumping up information about pagerank in their sitemaps? Publicizing the damn thing was one of the worst things that ever happened to search engines and the web.

Here's the post that started this debate:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005874.html