Jennifer Laycock provides an interesting take on NoFollow, blog spamming, paid text links, and the role of the Federal Trade Commission and Google. I do see the FTC taking a more active role against blog spammers, including the covert paid word-of-mouth campaigns one sees that are really no different than the e-mail spam that fills your inbox.

However, she overestimates the likelihood that small business owners are going to be injured because they can’t afford to compete with larger competitors for paid stealth links.

Most successful Internet marketers I know are able to do very well in the search engine rankings without paying a dime for links. Of course, they’re not going to share the how-to with everyone.

I encourage you to seriously consider DoFollow for your blog. UPDATE - See comment below.

If you’re using WordPress, you can take care of the spam issue with Lucia’s LinkLove and Spam Karma 2 plugins while rewarding bloggers who provide substantive comments with the links they deserve.

About the Author

With an advanced international law degree from Georgetown University and more than 14 years of real world legal experience, Attorney Mike Young shows entrepreneurs how to protect and grow their businesses online. He's the author of "Internet Marketing Legal Secrets Revealed," "How to Create Your Own Internet Business Without a Lawyer for Under $175," and the creator of Website Legal Forms Generator^TM. Not just a lawyer who focuses exclusively on Internet and marketing law, Mike’s been working with computers for more than 27 years (his first computer was an Atari 400 with 8 KiB RAM) and started representing Internet businesses back in 1996.