Due to the recent announcement of Google’s top SEO guy Matt Cutts of a way to report to Google sites who sell links on their pages, there has been a lot of online discussion about the whole economy of buying and selling links and how it affects search engine rankings, with particular emphasis on small people like bloggers who use text links from brokers like Text Link Ads as a way to get additional income. For instance, Yuga touched a bit on the topic by talking about links from WordPress themes.

Well, Philipp Lenssen has written a very interesting, excellent, and well-researched article about the economies of paid linking. The article talks about the compromises of various ad systems, how paid links work, the controversial “nofollow” directive, search engine gaming, and the considerations and options that a web content creator should know when considering selling links.

It’s a very informative blog post and if you’re at all interested in the topic, you should go over there and read it.