The Google Link Selling Debate

There's been a huge amount of discussion in search marketing circles and blogs about Google's decision to penalise sites for selling links and who don't put the 'nofollow' attribute on them (rel="nofollow"). This is to cut down on link farming sites and the huge amount of spam that's out there, but many sites who legitimately sell links as advertising space have also been hit - as you can imagine it's not gone down well.

To read about this more, here's a pick of some of the debate that's been going on, some of which show examples of popular websites that have been hit and had their Page Rank down graded by Google:
Google's PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links? - Search Engine Land
The PageRank Debate - New Media Knowledge
Three Clicks to Spam: Google’s Hypocritical Link Selling Policy - Mashable.com
Google Changing the PageRank Algorithm? - Daily Blog Tips
Did You Lose Your PageRank Because You Are Selling Paid Links? - Sahaban.com