Comments on: Is Selling Text Links Dangerous?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:25:03 +0000

You own my respect and gratitude. Thanks to your hard labour and persistance we have a magnificent web and together with other standards an easy to use enviroment. Thank you!

By: GiorgosK

GiorgosK — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:33:09 +0000

Very well put Crispian, but how a search engine, or even a human will KNOW that the link I place on my blog has actually been PAID for SPECIFICALLY for increasing the site’s PAGERANK ?

By: Avatarien

Avatarien — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 20:06:14 +0000

Why does this article seem backwards?

All the quotes deal with the BUYING of text-links, not selling! Matt Cutts or any other Google person has indicated that sites selling links are being penalized in any way. If you do have quotes indicating this, then please show the citations and link to the original articles please.

Imagine the bloodbath in the SERPS that would occur if Google actually penalized any and all sites selling any form of link advertisement? All Google is doing is not transferring PageRank from Site A to Site B if they believe the link was paid for… Nothing more…nothing less. I see no reason why you should fear *selling* text links unless your trying to pull a fast one over Google by embedding links into content and not telling anyone they are sponsored links. Now that might well get you penalized and that likely would require manual review.

By: apeisa

apeisa — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:17:04 +0000

Thinking that people buy text links mainly because PR/SEO is what web developers and -professionals think. Many small business owners, who think it just a good way to get more people to your site - doesn’t know what PR or SEO is. They have maybe heard about it, but they really don’t care that much.

I have used text links as marketing purposes only - with good results. I’m sure we have text link ads even if they won’t affect PR in any way.

By: wheeler

wheeler — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:55:12 +0000

I’m still bitter that Google feels it has a right to tell us we can’t profit from selling links on our sites without a nofollow tag… I agree with others that the main goal of people buying text links is to get the PR/SEO advantage.

Removing that advantage takes away the main purpose of buying a link in the first place, hence cutting into the selling site owners potential profits.

Now advertisers with deep pockets will inevitably buy links that will appear in-content rather than the “sponsored links” section, probably garnering even more SEO advantage than ever before, and hence widening the gap between big business and small.

By: Mitch @ Interspire.com

Mitch @ Interspire.com — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:03:43 +0000

Good post, Chrispian. I think a LARGE number of people buying paid text links do so for the PageRank - but they don’t take into account that by buying a text link on that site, the PageRank able to be distributed to their site is dwindling for each paid link that site sells.

Paid text links bring a lot of inquisitive traffic, but in my opinion very few sales, *unless* they aren’t all grouped together under a “Featured” or “Sponsors” section on the site. If the text links are placed maybe at the end of a blog post, like this:

“If you need ACME products, why not take a look at ACME.com”

Just my 2 cents.

By: devberlin

devberlin — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:19:41 +0000

Google can do what they want but I still think that their main reason to ban link buyers / sellers is to weaken competitors in the link marketing business. The justify many things with their webmaster guidelines but breach them themselves.

By: apeisa

apeisa — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:01:20 +0000

Well, that’s a generalization, the majority of people buy links for the PR.

I have to disagree. I think many of the people buying text ads doesn’t even know what PageRank is, and they buy links for same reasons that they buy banners. Or advertise in other medias.

Why google adwords are so popular? They won’t make your pagerank up, but they will show (or at least try to show) your link next to relevant content. But that was something you mentioned already.

So I think that text link ads will be there as long as there is ads in general. PR for sure is a great bonus.

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 08:21:32 +0000

There seems to be a trend, probably led by the search engines, that links are a sacred, democratic voting system. They’re not - they’re just links. Some of them might represent an endorsement or vote. Others represent legitimate advertising, and some represent deceptive advertising. If the search engines want to continue monetizing other peoples markup, they’ll have to get better at identifying the different use-cases of links, rather than frowning upon any and all legitimate advertising deals that involve paid links.

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 04:10:39 +0000

“For me, my advice is to only sell links that are as close to relevant as possible, and the same goes for buying.”

That’s good advice. I think as long as the links you’re selling are relevant (i.e links that you might have used anyway, not completely unrelated to your site’s content), they may be useful to your readers, and also it would be very hard for a search engine to detect them algorithmically.