I notice your ‘I disclose’ link, which is great. But why aren’t you disclosing your paid links in a way search engines can understand? (ie by using the nofollow tag or javascript or redirects that robots are blocked from)

Whether a blog has paid links or does not have paid links is, in my opinion, not an indicator of whether a blog is quality or not. This opinion is shared by, I would guess to say, the majority of the (paid) blogging community. Of course there is a great deal of debate whether bloggers should make money from their blogs or not, but that topic is not part of this post so I won’t debate that here.

If you want to get a good example of people who are posting paid links, please please check out Karoli’s post, because she gives an excellent account of who us paid bloggers are, and how evil (or un-evil) we truly are.

I appreciate the debate with you.

I am often bemused why people complain about google’s attack on paid links. They are CLEARLY a massive problem for all search engines (and everyone who uses search engines). If paid links were tolerated and were effective, then search results would effectively turn into a big list of sponsored results. When people search they want to find the most relevant sites to their search. They don’t want a list of sites, ordered by how much money those sites are willing to pay for visitors.

How would you feel if some other site out ranked you simply because they had more money, and bought more links?

Thanks for the Digg and the link.