Phil notices that several oreillynet.com sites now include paid placement of search engine spam, obscurely placed links whose purpose is not to catch your eye, but to catch the eye of search engines, to increase search relevance scores.

Tim O'Reilly has noticed Phil's comments and is investigating the issue, blogging details. Tim believes there are difficult questions involved, and I agree to a certain extent: If it's the purpose of these sponsored links (inflating PageRank or catching eyeballs) that's at issue and not the links themselves, then how do we determine intent? Is it OK for sites to trade in their PageRank?

What's wrong here is the gap between the endorsement of the advertiser by the content provider perceived by the reader, and that perceived by an influential relevance algorithm. An eyeball ad is obvious to the reader as an endorsement from the editor: It says oreillynet.com is willing to associate itself with the advertiser by giving them prominent display space.

PageRank ads, on the other hand, are anonymous endorsement: the effects on the display space, and on the reader, are minimal, and the effect on Google's PageRank algorithm is not obviously affiliated with the editor providing the endorsement. In this arrangement, editors may be more willing to accept link placement from low quality advertisers, and that's definitely the case here.

If making the endorsements invisible to the reader is obviously wrong, then I don't see how tucking them away in the corner of a site below the fold is much better. O'Reilly says that they've carried these sponsored links for two years, and only now are people noticing. Only after two years of hosting PageRank ads is oreillynet.com being held accountable by its readers for these endorsements. That's a problem.

The "hard questions" about selling PageRank are irrelevant. These sponsored links could just as easily be made more attractive to the eye, more prominently displayed on the site, and be for a more reputable product, and still be intended, in part, to exploit PageRank. I don't think anyone would object to the ads under those circumstances. At that point, it's more obviously the search engine's responsibility to improve the quality of their results in the face of genuine endorsement of advertisers by highly ranked web sites.