Since the Google PageRank storm last October, I have changed how I place ads on my sites. Some of my sites, like here on PlanetMike.com, I don’t have advertising at all. Other, like ChristmasMusic247.com, do have advertising. But all ads on my sites now have the overly broad nofollow tag on them. In the past 6 months, three different ticket brokers have contacted me about adding ads to my site. And all of them backed away because they aren’t interested in sites that have the nofollow tag on ads. So if a search engine wants to prune out bad actors in the online ad space, all they need to is look at sites that are linking to the large ticket brokers. It’s also obvious that the ticket brokers aren’t really interested in supporting small web sites, or building their customer base from niche web sites. They want to game the search engines by the text in the links in the ads they would run. And that’s exactly what Google is trying to fight.