Search Engine Spam?

Just a note to Tim on this. From the linked article: …and a couple of other areas, though affiliate sites such as and linuxquestions.org, which are O'Reilly branded but which we do not own, have less restrictive policies, which is why you will see ads for…. We (LinuxQuestions.org) have far more restrictive policies than the rest of the O'Reilly sites from what I can tell. To weigh in on the actual question at hand, I don't have any problem at all with relevant text links as long as they are non deceptive and done right. The way that most of them are done at O'Reilly make sense to me. As an example, many of the visitors in question are the type that go to conferences and would therefore need hotels. That seems 110% legit to me. I can't see why such a fuss was made by the original poster, especially considering that those links have been there as long as I can remember.
–jeremy