Parsing the Link Selling Debate
If you follow search news you can't have escaped the debate that's developed around Jeremy Zawodney's decision to sell links on his blog.

The debate revolves around Jeremy's decision to post paid links without a nofollow tag.

Leaving the nofollow tag off means that these paid linkers get "link value" or "vote value" or "link juice" without having done anything search engines would typically deem "link worthy."

My stance?

Jeremy earned his link juice by getting into a position (at Yahoo, in the world at large) where his opinion would make his blog something of an authority site. I feel he should not be penalized for selling this reputation that he has earned for himself.

Also he wrote his ass off and created tons of free content for many indices.

At the other side of the debate is the opinion that links, if they are to be used as a measure for relevance in a search algorithm, must not be sold. And if they are sold they should have the nofollow tag so that SEs will know not to consider the landing page as related or relevant.

It should also be noted that the debate's so hot because it comes down, to some extent, to Yahoo (Jeremy Zawodney) vs Google (Matt Cutts).

And that's my executive summary + personal slant version of the debate. (Thanks to Scott Woodard for discussion!!)

If you really want to dig into it here are all related posts (that I've found).

Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny Caught In Link Selling Debate (SEW - start here!)
It's A Bloggin' Smackdown: Jeremy (Yahoo) v. Cutts (Google) (Battelle wraps up the debate well)

Evil Jeremy Part 2 (WebGuerilla)
Zawodny Says No to Link Condoms. (WebGuerilla)

Hey, You Can't Link To That! (Jeremy Zawodney)
Struck the Sponsored Links Nerve, Did I? (Jeremy Zawodney)

Text links and PageRank (Matt Cutts)
Text link follow-up (Matt Cutts)

link condom (oilman, who just joined the SEW forums, dubbed nofollow tags "link condoms")
Six Degrees of a Lesbian Porn Scraper (Zawodney's getting close to that fine line...)
Links, Condoms, Shit and Fans (oilman)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |