One of the questions I asked at the search engine Q+A on links was "how do the engines feel about pay-per-post services on blogs, where advertisers can buy links and product reviews?" The consensus answer shocked me and probably will shock you, too.

On the panel were:

• Tim Converse from Yahoo! (smart, to-the-point, clear and genuine; I wish I could have met him in person afterwards)
• Adam Lasnik from Google (who seemed a bit uncomfortable and on-the-spot, but who can blame him)
• Vivek Pathak from Ask.com (never met him before, but we had a great chat afterwards - a truly friendly and interested individual)
• Eytan Seidman from MSN (whose forth-rightness is terrific, even if he comes off a bit gruff on the stage)

Tim answered first and said that Yahoo! wouldn't try to pick one post out of twenty or fifty on every blog that might be running advertorials or paid reviews just to stop link value from that particular post. If the engine looked at the site and saw that in general, the outgoing links were of high quality, there would be no discount of link value for paid blog material. Adam from Google agreed, but said little in particular. Vivek from Ask was quick to note that if the link were off-topic, Ask would be likely not to give that link much weight, but I pointed out that most advertisers would buy links from highly relevant blogs, not just for the search engine value, but because they wanted the qualified, relevant traffic from click-throughs as well as branding. Eytan from MSN agreed but didn't expand and when Tim Converse from Yahoo! jumped back in to say that it really wasn't worth an engine's time to going picking out paid links with that granularity, all the other panelists were vigorously head-nodding and verbally agreeing.

Why am I shocked? Not because I thought SEs really would or could discount pay-per-post on an individual level, but because I've never heard that level of straight-forwardness about a near-grey-hat subject like that before. Kudos to all of you - more direct answers like that will continue to earn the respect and admiration of attendees and industry professionals. Consider me impressed (and thankful).