The RSS feeds this morning have been somewhat lacking in excitement. I’m about 60% through them all and the first post to catch my eye is a post over at impNERD. The post is about a new blogger widget called ScratchBack.

ScratchBack is an online “tipping” system. It allows you, the publisher, to accept tips and “give back” links or images in return.

You name your price on your tips, and you earn money from every interaction through our easy-to-use automated system. It’s free to sign-up, and you can have a TopSpot widget on your website or blog in minutes.

In other words, as I read it, you “tip” a blogger and in exchange you get a link. AKA… text link selling.

But unlike Text Link Ads, Linkworth, and Pay Per Post, ScratchBack is playing by rules of the Google god.

Do My Links Pass Page Rank?
They do not. Every single link, including the link back to Scratchback, in the TopSpot widget has a “nofollow” hard encoded in them. The code is delivered in Javascript format as well. That means that Google and other search engine spiders “won’t follow” the link. I doesn’t mean your link isn’t clickable, it is.

You cannot remove that code, nor should you attempt to as per the user agreement every publisher and advertiser agree to upon registration. Google has made it perfectly clear that “selling page rank” is not something they believe in. We don’t believe in it either. This system is built for fun. There are plenty of other solutions out there you can use if you want to “pass Google juice”, just not this one. Did you hear that Google?

So yes, it is a form of link selling. No, it’s not going to be looked down on by Google.