the ‘paid link haters’ think people just buy paid reviews purely for SEO benefits, but that’s a very naive view, as imo, the majority of advertisers just want the buzz around the blogosphere first and foremost – yeah the SEO benefits were a nice sweetener, but not essential.

if advertisers demand a ‘follow’ link, they will now be hurting themselves in terms of SEO, so i’d imagine ‘no follow’ will become the norm on paid reviews, unless of course Google change their rules again.

hopefully for us bloggers, we’ll regain some sort of credit with google as a result of this, as we haven’t just sold up and stopped blogging – something google had suggested by basically saying paid links were a rich man’s spam.

seems a bit odd, I’ll keep on eye on these developments