UPDATE 2013: The post below no longer reflects my thinking or position on the topic of paid links. Please read Our Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads for more. I'm leaving the post below for posterity, and as a reminder that opinions and realities change :-)
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I've been friendly with two of our industry's biggest purveyors of text link ads - TextLinkBrokers' Jarrod Hunt and Text-Link-Ads' Patrick Gavin - for the last couple years. With the relaunch of Jarrod's site and a relative lull in the antagonism towards paid link services, I thought it would be valuable to open up the blog for discussion on the subject.
The Ethics of Buying & Selling Links
Let me first say that I empathize with the frustration of search engineers when it comes to paid links. The fundamental problem is that advertising in old-media (in print, television or radio) is easy to spot - ads are labeled in print, run during commercials on TV and generally are mentioned as sponsors, if not explicitly conveyed as ads over the radio. Thus, users of these mediums know that they're getting paid content that is only passively endorsed by the media operator.
In the world of search engines, where links are counted as votes and translate into rankings at the engines, the concern is that advertising dollars could be influencing the positions and traffic of competing sites. Thus, the search engines want to have websites add "nofollow" to links that aren't editorial endorsements of the quality of a site, thus keeping the link ecosphere free of the pollution that paid links could introduce.
Rand's Position on Text Link Purchasing & Nofollow
While I can certainly see the position of the engines, I have to strongly disagree with their methodology. For me, the primary issue here is one of trust - there's some questions that I think are important to ask:
- Can we trust all link buyers and sellers to comply with the terms set out by the search engines?
- Once a search engine issues guidelines like "use nofollow on paid links or risk losing the ability to pass link juice," is it reasonable to expect that sites worldwide will have knowledge of this edict and immediately begin implementing solutions?
- Is there an efficient, editorial, non-algorithmic way to ensure compliance with these rules?
I believe that the clear answer to all of these is "No." Thus, webmasters and search engines both have a clear path before them. It's up to search engines to find algorithmic ways to combat spam or manipulation, including identification of paid links. Webmasters have a responsibility to themselves, their users and their content - in that order. I'd suggest that tagging paid links with "nofollow" is, in most circumstances, against the financial interests of a site operator. The risk of being singled out by an editorial review at the search engines (and thus, losing the ability to pass linkjuice) is so low when compared to the financial gains that are afforded to link sellers who refuse to use nofollow that it makes little sense to comply. Those who do comply will be at a competitive disadvantage in revenue flow and may find that their traffic and positions are eventually eroded by competitors who use their revenue to build content, links and marketing campaigns.
When it comes to deciding on the purchase of a text link (or a package), I'd think about it from an ROI perspective. If you can break even on monetizing the traffic that comes directly through the link (referral traffic), any "linkjuice" you might get to help your rankings is strictly bonus, thus the purchase decision becomes clear. If, however, you're getting very little traffic, but may achieve great rankings from the boost, be cautious - if a search engine ever does pull the plug on the ranking value of those links, you might have a costly expense that's bringing in little to no income. At this point, my philosophy becomes - if your boosted rankings at MSN are bringing you enough revenue to sustain the link spend, keep it running. 
The decision to sell text links can sometimes be more difficult - particularly if you have real concerns that the engines might demote you for it. My recommendation is to do what the search engines always say when it comes to content and link building - imagine a world without search engines, then make your decision. If the ads are relevant and your visitors will find them worthwhile, that's the best of all worlds. As you start to slide down the slope into utter irrelevance and low quality, be very careful. Search engines do look at who you link to, and the algorithms are increasingly good at identifying (and penalizing) sites that link to spammy/manipulative players.
This is where a good text link broker (like Jarrod or Patrick) can come in handy - it's their job to protect you from being identified by the search engines for running paid ads (by not writing idiotically simple software) and to protect buyers from being ID'd as clients of link sellers. Link brokers also have the burden of finding the links that will provide the highest value for their clients and selling the most relevant real estate (so users of a site won't be turned off by the links they see).
How good are these guys? I'd say that as of today, they're both in the "pretty darn good" column - the great majority of their clients are receiving great value from the services, whether they buy or sell. Occasionally, there'll be folks who get poor value from running a campaign, but to date, I've never received a complaint when I've recommended either of them.
TextLinkBrokers
Textlinkbrokers' brand spanking new site
Worth reading - their blog and their very well-done LinkBuilding Wiki.
Text-Link-Ads
Text-Link-Ads' Shiny Website
Worth reading - their blog (frequently brilliant) and the link buying guide (warning - PDF).
I obviously can't talk much about our clients, and we're actually very rarely clients of either Jarrod's or Patrick's. We have a few clients who've used them and a couple who do to this day, with great success (on both the buying and selling sides of the equation). It really boils down to usefulness and application. AdSense is a paid link model that only operates when you get clickthroughs. Banner ads are monetizing the pageviews based on branding (much like traditional media). Text link ads rely on a small combination of both (branding & click-throughs) with an additional value component from the "vote" passed to the search engines. In a capitalist-based economy, it's very hard to argue that text link advertising is unethical.
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the debate, the use of nofollow, your experiences buying and selling ads and what else you'd like to see from Patrick & Jarrod. I have little doubt they'll probably give this thread a look, so feel free to make outrageous demands 
.
My Question is for Rand does this article still apply today as of the Panda update and other updates? If not where is the updated post I would like to do my research.
Paid text links, and yes we are a broker as well, have less to do with Panda, and more to do with Penguin.
And Penguin has to do with a variety of off-page factors.
Foremost, over-optimizing your anchors. This means, your anchors, as a base percentage have far too much of your most valued short tail search terms. Having to high of a percentage of keyword heavy, unbranded anchors, and you are likely to get penalized.
Secondly, "double dipping" on various "exact match anchors"... whether you are white hat or not, it's not natural to have a bunch of links that all have exact match anchor text.
eg: Having dozens of links with the anchor Buy Cheap Golf Clubs
and the links as pointing to:
https://mydomain.com/buy-cheap-golf-clubs/index.html
(or anything like that)
Proper link buying should only be an extension of your normal link baiting and other white hat techniques....
Hope this helps!
I have used TLA in the past and I will probably use it (or other similar services) again in the future. However, I prefer buying directly from site owners for quite a few simple reasons.
I usually get better prices I can negotiate the positioning and the look of the add I am able to do my research before buying I can get long term discounts (I like getting links for six months or more)
Am9905d,
I suggest that anyone that has the knowledge and the time to do link buys for themselves should. Brokers are there to provide services to those who cannot do it for themselves or do not have time to deal with it.
I've run Text Link Ads for a client of mine this month as a test and it's looking like a bad investment (~$200/mo.) since it doesn't really drive traffic.
That was really my hope - that it would drive legitimate traffic - and help PR as a bonus.
What I don't understand is - isn't it REALLY easy for Google to identify these links? It can't be that hard to find " -- start TEXT-AD-LINKS EDITABLE AREA --" in the HTML or even login to a text link ads account and get all the "sellers".
good point. either text-ad-links operates from the GooglePlex or he is on Google VIP Guestlist (Google VIP = the websites who can do whatever they want without ever getting banned)
What's wrong with tla dot com? it's not working tonight...
You said:
"The fundamental problem is that advertising in old-media (in print, television or radio) is easy to spot - ads are labeled in print, run during commercials on TV and generally are mentioned as sponsors, if not explicitly conveyed as ads over the radio."
Well.. I think this is not always the case. This weekend I was listening to my Buffalo Bills on the radio. The announcer said: "That was great coverage by the Bill's secondary, if you need great coverage for your family, call Blue Cross / Blue Sheild of Western New York."
This caught my attention. So I started counting. There were at least 20 of these "targeted keyword" ads in the delivery from the announcer of the football game.
This strikes me as no different than sponsored text links on the Internet. For that matter, we have product placements directly in movies (actor drinking a Coke vs drinking a Pepsi).
So. I think I have to disagree with your post here. There are MANY MANY examples where advertising is NOT explicit, disclosed, or any warning given to the listener or viewer prior.
Guys...for all the differences of opinion, this is clearly a growing market that isnt going away.
I know everything natural search is always difficult to put a value on, but does anyone have any idea how much the paid links sector is worth or will be worth in a years time.
Is this a fly by night venture?
Apologies if the question is misplaced on the thread, but it sounds like a good chance to ctahc some savvy people.
Look forward to your replies
Hi Waza,
We have all (Me, Patrick, and others) spent the last 4 years growing this industry, It's definitly not a fly-by-night venture.
As for the total value of all the paid links sector combined, your guess is as good as mine. I do know several people earning 7 figures doing it though.
A rough guess would put it in the 10-50 million dollar range.
As for the future, we see no decline in sight.
As old as this article is, it's still very relevant today.
Some great thoughts Fish, I agree that there are ways to go on one side or another of paid links.
The search engines certainly need to figure out a new method to declare what are "ads" and what are not ads. Nofollow is not the best system, but could be if it was improved and adopted by all the search engines -- not just Google.
Going direct can be a great strategy. However, we've seen that most high quality sites are not interested in working directly with individual advertisers for a few hundred dollars a month. You can certainly gain some traction this way with "mom and pop" type sites, but quality makes all the difference with buying links.
Trying to keep my white hat as clean as possible I had to consider many aspects of text link buying and selling from different points of view to decide on how ethical text link ads are in my opinion.
So of course it is good to have some prominent SEO specialists to write about that topic. Nevertheless your opinion is too much SEO centered and not enough taking into account what's best for internet users.
Even as a SEO I am an internet user in the first place and want my Google results to be clean and valuable. Also as a white hat SEO I often notice that my competitors buy links just for Google juice to outmatch me in the SERPS. Last but not least as online journalist I care about the differentiation between content and ads so we can still distunguish between ads and editorial content.
I read Matt Cutts take on text links several times and have to admit that the Google position on that topic is at least "weltfremd" as we in Germany say. Matt Cutts really wants advertisers to cripple their own campaigns by making ad links completely invisible for search engine spiders. Google does not count and spider nofollow-links at all. So what Google says is that advertisers are untrusted per definition. This is of course nonsense.
So what we need is a way to deal with it somewhere in the middle of those two perceptions. As I suggested at Google Blogoscoped ( https://blog.outer-court.com/forum/63607.html) the current microformats or new yet to be devised ones could be a solution. It's Web 2.0 isn't it? Vote links microformats ( https://microformats.org/wiki/vote-links) feauture by now "vote-for" "vote-abstain" and "vote-against".
Current nofollow means even more than "vote against" it means ignore altogether.
Moreover we need are more shades of grey, like vote for a little or something similar.
If search engines would introduce support for that microformat by favouring sites which use it for all of their links and are not voting for all of them we would have quickly most webmasters using it. Of course you could still vote for your advertisers like The Deck does e.g. Ads are often votes but not always. Nofollow is just a buggy workaround that does not work and makes the web limp.
So after those musings I decided that as a white hat SEO I owe my clients at least advice on text link ads. I will tell them how not do it (spammy) but I won't tell them text link ads are evil as a rule. Webmasters should be allowed to mark text link ads as ads without having to be afraid of penalties by Google. Those links should be counted as votes. Of course natural links should count more.
P.S.: Remember that Google itself approves of paid links saying that directories are a good way of gaining links. We all know that the best directories, those you do not have to wait a year to be approved, are the paid ones. Wait, what are their names? Yahoo, MSN? Aren't those search engines too?
If you allow an ad e.g. Acme widget company to display, do TextLinkBrokers/TextLinkAds pay you each month that Acme is on your site or is it a one time deal?
Text-links-ads has been trying to get me to use them for the last week. It seems to me buying links is exactly what google is trying to stop, yet tla has banners all over search engine watch - so if they were that bad why are they still around?
What are your thoughts?
You know, this article was written quite some time ago. Well written and balanced.
It gives the opportunity for hindsight. Over the last five years a lot has changed with seo. Is the link building value of paid links still worth it compared to the new Social Media and Google Places craziness?
I've been trying it for a while now and I can tell that if you do those kind of maneuvers on a website that already have at least some basic link love and some different anchor text pointing to various pages on your site, it can dramatically increase your SERPs.
I usually use them on the toughest keywords of my main page. And another tip that I could throw in is that I often look at the client competitor inbound links and try to identify the 2-3 websites that he gets most of its link from and get the same links (to balance it out). And then, I add my own white recipe so I usually end up with great results... Although I have to say that this is on steroids; it is no "lifetime warranty", but guess what, nothing is nowadays so a few hundred dollars to speed up the process gets the job done, especially when you're David against Goliath.
But, let's all show respect to Rand, it will never compare to true linkbaiting ideas (and it seems like greyish seo tactics or controversial posts lead to great linkbaiting nowadays ;)
About how long does it take you to see results directly from buying the links?
Markus,
That really depends on a lot of things.
It depends on the kind of links you buy and the keywords you are trying to rank for, to name a few.
It is possible to see results in just a few weeks on keywords that are low in competition.
It is possible to see results in just a few weeks even for competitive keywords if you buy the right kind of links.
But in general you should plan on 3 to 6 months of link building to see any kind of major movement.
It really depends on the stategy and the competition.
@john barton : google just want to link the quality, and not from the engine or whatever it is, I personally believe building more links toplinksbuild.com because this site can be relied upon to regulate the placement strategy that links strategies and most importantly safe and natural, with a minimum price I get maximum satisfaction with the increase in sales in the clothing business .. hopefully my reference can help ...thank's
Google says that they are all about relevancy. Doesn't it stand to reason that the websites who are doing campaigns through TLA and like companies are going to be relevant to the search queries. This just makes economic sense. No one who sells viagra is going to spend the kind of moiney that buying quality links costs just to boost their PR.
For two competitors who both sell widgets - who cares which one is #1 and which one is #2 EXCEPT themselves. These are commerical enterprises who deserve to gain visibility any which way they can.
Now, some will say that what if someone is looking for medical advice on Erectile Dysfunction and the first 20 results are people selling Viagra and then only after that come links for places that aren't selling Viagra. What then? Well the firs thing that comes to mind is that the places selling Viagra have an incentive to provide up to date information on ED. The second thingis that in a grown-up world people have to learn to distinguish info-mercials from information and if they have to wade through the bunk first with a few extra clicks then so be it. Anyone not providing any VALUE at their websites will be gone from the SERPS soon enough due to LACK OF BUSINESS.
Google is going WAY past it's mandate trying to put it's tentacles into what people choose to do privately between themselves.
IF they really wanted to do away with TLA and similar companies then they would just do away with PageRank altogehter. Don't show it, don't discuss it, don't sell it to everyone as the cornerstone of your business because when you do then people will manipulate it just like the guy who calls his business AAA Plumbing.
When no one knows what a link is worth then it becomes very hard to sell.
There are a lot of pros&cons about buying text link ads. The main problem is that if Google finds out you are in a big trouble, so you should be careful with the automated link placement brokers, like TLA. I personally use selected-links.com where they allow you to see whether your link is going to be placed automatically or manually. I prefer when my links are placed manually, so search engines cannot find out that I buy links. Anyway, this is one of link building tactics I personally use. Hope this helps,
I agree that there are no good non-algorithmic ways for the SEs to solve this "problem". First of all, it's silly to ask people not to buy and sell text links. They are a valuable commodity with an active market, and it's pretty tough to get people to stop participating in such a market by saying "pretty please".
There are probably some ways to identify whether a link is an ad, and the SEs will have to develop and use them if they want to avoid ad pollution.
People aren't going to voluntarily use nofollow unless there is some worthy incentive - if the SEs penalized you heavily for not doing it, they could make it work, but that would probably be as hard or harder to implement than just finding the ads in the first place.
No-follow is certainly not a fix all, but I have to give Google some credit.
I personally run several blogs, and it gets really old having to sort through comment spam. Having no-follow on your links really turns off blog spammers.
In some personal tests that we ran, 70-90% of blogs in certain industry use the no-follow tag.
Some of them are interested in trying to reduce PR leakage, while some are interested in discouraging spammers.
As a tool for combating paid links, its not very good. But as a tool for webmasters to use to control PR flow and discourage spammers, it's pretty darn good.
Sadly, we tell clients who purchase links from TLA that they should expect little if any traffic to come from them. I find that a bit dissappointing. Part of this might be because of the actual positioning of the links themselves on the page.
Patrick/Jarrod, care to comment on click-through rates on the links themselves?
Thanks!
ImarketNC,
To be keeply blunt, very little of what we do at TLB has to do with building direct traffic through links. We are interested solely on the SEO value of them.
While there are links that are great for traffic and links that are great fro SEO, they arent always the same thing.
Traditional link building theory states that if a link is in a position on a page to recieve lots of traffic, it is probably a better link for SEO (Block Level Analysis). While I would agree that is the case some of the times, it is definitly not the case all the time.
Our primary focus is increasing the rankings of our clients through effective link building. If those links happen to be good for traffic too, then thats great, but we will not sacrifice the SEO value of a link to get a few clicks. There are plenty of other companies out there focused on that.
With all that being said. We do have customers of our custom programs that hire us out to track down "direct traffic building" links. A lot of the analysis we do to find "good seo links" also works well for finding "good direct traffic links". If a client understands the difference, then we have no problem with building both.
Rand/Patrick, thank you for the kind words.
I also have to give kudos to you Patrick, I couldnt ask for a better competitor. I remember the days when we used to do a lot of cross-brokering. You've also got a huge advertising budget, which has done great things for putting the word out about Text Link Advertising.
Over here at TLB we are very excited about the future of link building in general. As new methods continue to be discovered, we are finding new ways to provide value to our customers.
The one downfall is that with an ever tightening grip by Google it is becoming harder and harder to get the same results. Which means that it is getting more and more expensive for the average webmaster to compete with the guys who have big budgets.
Thats where Rand comes in. Educating all of us on how to be creative with our link building campaigns. A little creativity goes a long way towards saving money!
Anyways, I'm all ears for any suggestions on how TLB can improve its services.. Here are a few that are already in the works:
1. Automation (Billing, Shopping Cart, etc..) 2. Self Service Client Portals 3. Improved Reseller Programs 4. New innovative Link Building programs (We have several in the works that we are very excited about) 5. Better customer service through better processies 6. Better trained staff 7. Online Evaluation Tools
Cheers!
Rand, thx for poking a stick into the fire of link buying again :) Jarrod, congrats on the new design, it looks great!
Ok enough pleasantries, Markus you have it exactly right in terms of what a proper link buying strategy should be and that is: purchase on sites that have the best chance of sending targeted traffic and let the link popularity fall where it will. Sorry it doesn't seem to be working well with your campaign but we are striving towards that goal with our network every day.
As far as leaving a "footprint" behind in our links, it is entirely possible in some instances. Basically we serve the publisher a block of html links and it is 100% up to the publisher how they format around them. Thanks for giving our service a shot and hoping this time you see a rankings boost soon ;)
Nice article