I recently received an email letting me know that blogging superstar Jeremy Zawodny has decided to sell text links on his blog. If you have no idea who Jeremy is, you might be wondering why I’d waste the time to write about it. After all, he certainly isn’t the first blogger to decide to monetize his site with paid text links. And you are right. If Jeremy was just another blogger selling links, I wouldn’t have ever mentioned it. But Jeremy isn’t just another blogger. He is an extremely prominent blogger who also happens to work for Yahoo Search.

All search engines (including Jeremy’s employer) have made it very clear that they despise paid text link advertising. Sponsored text links on trusted sites like Jeremy’s causes all kinds of problems for search engines because they don’t believe a paid link should count as an algorithmic vote.

Penalizing trusted sites for selling links isn’t really an option because so many people search for them by name. Removing them from SERPS would leave users wondering why they can’t find their favorite sites.

Trusted sites also pass on an incredible amount of link juice so throttling them (preventing them from passing their juice to other sites) isn’t a great option either because it has a negative impact on all the non-paid links as well.

Ideally, a search engine’s goal is to separate out only the paid links for throttling. But that is something that is easier said then done. And that is why search engineers like Matt Cutts have been pushing the idea of "safe linking."

Safe linking involves placing a link condom on all paid text links. If trusted site owners were to do that, search engines wouldn’t have any problems with paid links. But the dilemma for the site owner is that using condoms dramatically reduces the value of the links.

So what did Jeremy decide to do? He works for a major search engine. You would think he would be sensitive to the problems caused by unsafe linking. Surely he followed Matt’s suggestion and applied condoms to all his paid links.

Nope. Apparently, he decided in favor of the cash. As I write this, there isn’t a single condom anywhere in Jeremy’s paid links.

So what will happen next? Will Jeremy cave and add the condoms? If he does, will advertisers continue to pay $300.00 per month for a juice-free link? Or will he stand his ground, forcing his good buddy Matt to take punitive actions? Will Matt throttle Jeremy’s entire site or will he take the easy way out and simply stick it to the individual advertisers?

I have no idea, but it’s going to be fun to watch it all play out.