We don't like Spam 2.0 and we did our part lately for better declaration of paid stuff. And since last weekend, Google doesn't like it either and is penalizing webpages, which sell text links or paid reviews. Matt Cutts apparently always warned about selling links without proper usage (like rel="nofollow), but since the last PageRank update of Google, it looks like it indeed happened (but in general, PageRanks fall and raise all the time and as every other SEO will tell you, is not important anyway :) )

Is this the beginning of the end of Spam 2.0? If you need a high PR to get good money with textlinks, but your PR falls if you do that (and your search engine position with it), it's maybe a lot less interesting for the average and self-respecting site owner to do it. And if you do it correctly (with rel="nofollow"), your clients don't get any linklove anymore and paying for them doesn't look that attractive anymore ...

But maybe it's just a big plot by Google, so that everyone will use AdSense in the future, since that certainly won't have any decrease of your PR as consequence (but also doesn't generate linklove for the advertiser). It's certainly not only for the love of humankind Google does such things.

Via Markus Tressl

Markus Tressl @ 09.10.2007 18:22 CEST
hi christian
from one point of view i totally agree with you of the consequences a blog has to take if he is selling links or is doing paid reviews.

but on the other hand these contents are the same as AdSense -- which is also providing space for links.

what do you think?
should other search engines penalize wensites using AdSense?

chregu @ 09.10.2007 19:46 CEST
adsense - as you said - doesn't do "real" links, just JS code for displaying them. What Google seems to penalize is the doing payed links like you would do for normal links. That's the main difference, I don't think (or hope) they do penalize you, if you for example do the yahoo adsense-like thingie. And they shouldn't penalize you, if you do the nofollow way...

But I didn't look really at the issue. I just did the conclusions from your post :)