That was a recent question asked by Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc, in response to Phil Ringnalda's comments claiming search engine spam by advertisers on O'Reilly sites. Phil had complained that the O'Reilly sites were selling links to search engine spammers. Here is one example he pointed out:

O'Reilly's OSDir.com, where amusingly enough I was looking to see what had happened to Danny O'Brien's To Evil! column, is brought to you by things like Cuban cigars, mortgage refinancing, Jack Daniels (no, I didn't click to see what sort of scam involves wanting to be highly ranked for "Jack Daniels"), online degrees, and cheap hotels: basically, the same folks who are spamming your comments...

As a result of this, a big debate has heated up regarding the issue of "link spam" and what to do about it. It is nothing entirely new. In fact debates like this have been going on for some time now. It is an issue that was recently discussed at the Search Engine Strategies San Jose "Buying & Selling Links" session where Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla made a point that Google created this monster when they popularized link popularity being added to search engine algorithms.

So back to Tim's original question, "Is It Appropriate for a Site to Monetize its Page Rank as Well as its Page Impressions?" Here is one of the points he makes:

It's pretty clear that the practice of "cloaking" -- that is, hiding links so that you're selling only the page rank -- is illegitimate. But what if someone pays you for a real ad, even if you know that they are paying you primarily because of your page rank rather than your targeted audience? As long as there's no deception as to the nature of the sponsored link, and a legitimate opportunity for click through, isn't this still an ad?

He goes on to say...

That leads to a whole nest of hard questions: Where are the boundaries between legitimate "search engine optimization" to help people find stuff that they will appreciate, and "search engine gaming", to inflate the rank of sites that are less useful? Whose responsibility is it to solve this problem? Should web sites turn away advertisers just because they are performing arbitrage on Google and other search engines? Or is it the search engine's responsibility to adjust their heuristics to counteract any attempts to game the system? Or both?

Matt Cutts, a leading software engineer at Google who often represents them on issues of spam, chimes in on this debate with the following comment:

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.

Wow! It will be very interesting to see where this all goes. In my opinion, Google created this beast and now they are trying to tame it. Internet marketers who either buy or sell links will definitely want to keep their eye on this issue and what policies end up being formed as a result of it.