Well said, it's simply not clear. If you go on yahoo.com and check the code, none of the ads (image or text links) have the "nofollow" tag. What does this mean? Does yahoo get penalized for this? No. Infact very rarely do you find the nofollow tag added for payed advertisments. The fact is, webmasters should be able to sell the pr bang of their site that they have worked so hard to acheive and google can't stop them from doing this. I would never in my right mind buy an ad with a nofollow tag anyway...it just doesn't make any sense. The ultimate goal of all webmasters is to gain visitors through organic traffic, and the only way to do that is to gain quality backlinks. In a way, it's kind of a paradox though, because google's stance on link selling does deter all link sales which overall helps the small time website owners. However, i agree with you that google discourages link sales souly for their own benefit. It just so happens to help a few of use out. Those small businesses that are able to deal under the table.