Whew! That was one busy week back there.

I didn’t get the chance to write about any of it, so I’ll take this RESTful Sunday afternoon to get caught up.

But first, let me ask you online journalists a question: why do you link? Most of you are probably saying, “What a simple question!”. Well, it may not be so simple after all.

You see, there’s a fellow who works at Yahoo by the name of Jeremy Zawodny. Mr. Zawodny decided that he would try a little experiment. He would sell links on his online journal. That, too, sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Well, no, not really.

It seems that search engines (including Mr. Zawodny’s employer) frown on paid links. If you’re going to put links that have been purchased on your site, they say, you should use the nofollow tag:

<a href="bogusdomain.com" rel="nofollow">Paid Link</a>

In fact, what Zawodny has done has been viewed as such a breach of Internet trust (see me, rolling my eyes), that Google won’t kick him out of their index, but will staunch the flow of link juice from his site.

The other issue is that one of those paid links leads to a website that links to another site that…well, describes some “titillating” poses you gals (and just you gals) might want to try. To be fair, Zawodny vetted the links he accepted, but from the discussion, it sounds like you could be penalized from being a step or two away from a bad link neighborhood.

This has been the talk of the SEO/SEM world over the course of the past week.

Links are the lifeblood of the World Wide Web. Hell, without them, we wouldn’t have much of a Web, now would we?

My issue is the whole six degrees of linking. Do we have to vet a blog or a website before linking to them? What if a big time blog accidently posts a link to a site that links to one of these bad neighborhoods? And does this mean that if an online journalist isn’t diligent with their efforts at wiping out comment spam, they could be in trouble? This could have some repercussions for online journalists if in fact this is for real.

And yeah, there is some thinking that search engines are becoming enforcers of the web rather than observers. My response: go read your Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially his writings on the Social Contract. The SE’s do have a right to providing a quality service, which means following some guidelines.