With Google enforcing rules on selling links from your site I thought it would be appropriate to ask webmasters how they this would change their link buying behaviour. Google does not want you selling links for the purposes of inflating your search engine ranking or PR. They suggest you tag such links with nofollow or use redirects, robot.txt, javascript or any other method that does not pass link juice. In this case would you still buy a link for the traffic/branding it would bring if it was a link using the nofollow/javascript/redirect? I realise many webmasters will be a bit cagey about answering this thread in the current climate so if you want to answer anonymously I have written a post on my blog(in the sig) where you can leave a comment.
If a link passes some good traffic, why wouldn't you want to buy it. The nice thing about buying links is they help with rankings, and my provide some direct traffic. If the link has a 'no follow' on it, it had better give me some direct traffic, or it is useless.
Bilz. The ranking is the part of the equation Google wants to remove with paid links. So a nofollow or google devaluing the link anyway will result in all paid links being equal in that they only provide direct traffic.
Basically Google has a flaw in their ranking system, and people were using programs like TLA to take advantage of it by buying text links that would both send direct traffic and at the same time help out the SERPs of the advertisers page. To fix this flaw, Google is using the power it has over the millions of users of its Adsense program to stop them from participating in link buying. It's sad that Google couldn't figure out a solution to devalue these links on their end, which would have save publishers a lot of hassle.
It's a highly flawed method they're using. They don't "allow" link selling for PR, fine. However there is NO way they can detect all paid links, which means only the sites smart enough to hide their paid links will get the benefits. How does that give better search results Google?
Those that sell links will give you one answer, and those that do not will give you another answer. IMO Google is most after those that "buy" PR with a view to "re-selling" that PR for profit at the moment. Sure, they can never detect all paid links - but some are more "above the radar" than others IMO
I realize that is what Google would like to achieve. They don't want rankings artificially inflated. I am saying that if a link has a nofollow on it than it had better produce direct traffic or it is worthless.