Looks like O’Reilly has added its name to the list of companies whoring out their PageRank to search engine spammers. I expect better from them.

By the way, don’t miss the comments on Phil’s post, inspired by the fact that Shelley Powers mentions that she has the same links on her site and that they help her make her car payment. I guess my position is that publishing those links on your site isn’t the most unethical way to earn a buck, but it is unethical. Publishing these links makes the Web a little bit worse for everybody. I guess a person could rationalize it by saying that the things that make a site a worthwhile spot to put those links in the first place adds value to the Web, and so it’s justifiable to post those links and offset some of the value being added to the Web in exchange for profit, but I still don’t like it.