The friendly guys over at TextLinkBrokers are about to become partners of SEOmoz - they're going to be hosting our new site (slightly delayed due to Matt's Hawaiian getaway - sorry folks) and helping us run some of the tools a bit faster. I was chatting with Jarrod Hunt, who runs the business and he let me know that they just released their guide to link buying. It's a good resource, nothing outstanding, but very solid for the inexperienced link buyer. However... this piece at the bottom simply floored me (emphasis mine):
What Makes TextLinkBrokers Different from Other Link Sellers?At Textlinkbrokers, we understand that it is important to keep our inventory confidential. This is essential in order to prevent the search engines from penalizing our inventory partners from passing link popularity to our clients. The search engines are actively searching for and penalizing sites that announce they are selling text links. Some of our competitors display their inventory to the public for all to see. While this helps them to increase sells it practically insures that most of their inventory has been penalized and will do nothing to help their clients increase their search engine rankings.
That's a pretty heavy allegation - that other link sellers are possibly penalizing their clients and almost certainly ensuring that the links don't pass search engine value by listing their inventory publicly where Google's spam team can check it at will. I was thinking that TLB was going a bit overboard until I went over to Patrick Gavin's recently sold Text-Link-Ads company (probably the best known link brokerage) and saw for myself:
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Text Link Ads' Autos Category Inventory Page
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First off, it's really cool that I can see the inventory that I'm about to buy. From a user perspective, particularly one who isn't familar with Google's war on paid links, this is a great user experience. But (and this a huge "But"), anyone can see that website, find the URL and check the "don't pass link value" box on the fancy Google console that Matt Cutts is always running around with at conferences.
I feel like I must be missing something. Is it really possible that Text Link Ads is doing such a great disservice to their customers? Why has no one called them out on this in the past? Is Google just looking the other way? Are other text link brokers showing their inventory?
My big question - Given that TLA's inventory is accessible to any search engineer, would you still be willing to buy ads from the public inventory section?
p.s. Reading over this, it sounds like I'm doing an ad for TLB and running an attack campaign against TLA. I just want to assure you that's not the case. We are partnering with TLB and Jarrod's note is how I found the article, but to be totally honest, when we've bought links for clients in the past (something we aren't currently doing), it was through TLA and not TLB, and the link value was pretty rockin' until Newsweek wrote about us and Matt Cutts shut down the TLA link value. I'd also consider TLA's owner, Patrick Gavin, a friend and a great guy - and recently, a very generous one, too. I'm just shocked that the inventory is out there.
Update: I just got off the phone with my friend Joe Morin, who noted that TLA is really not a link selling model for PageRank anymore. In his opinion, it's really competing with contextual models like Quigo or AdSense. This could be one explanation for why TLA isn't concerned with Google discovering and devaluing the ads.
I gotta say that I think Michael Martinez is way off the mark, unless he is excluding any competitive, money-making vertical in his “links-don’t-matter” theory.
I mean, we can all rank for "my penguin punched your Volvo" with content alone, but if you are going to play in the insurance, mortgage, credit card or any other competitive vertical you are going to need a number of good links...and building those links is going to take some time.
From my experience, the sites in truly competitive verticals need links a lot more than they need content. In fact, I see a lot of sites with hardly any content doing great for competitive terms based off of their links alone.
So Michael, hook us up with some real world examples of sites that prove your theory if you could…I would love to be proven wrong on this one.
And since we seem to have an audience with Jarrod, I have a question for him. Where do pre-sell pages fit into the link building mix? If I am correct, TLB sells pre-sell pages and I would like to better understand their ability to improve rankings. Also, do you think Google is actively looking to discredit pre-sell pages, or are pre-sells too hard to find?
Hello James,
Love the pic. I can see you are an extremely serious guy :)
Yes, you are correct we do sell pre-sell pages. We call them Hosted Marketing Pages.
First, let me explain exactly what they are, for those that aren’t familiar with them.
A Hosted Marketing Page is a content page, optimized for the clients keywords, hosted on a relevant site within our independent publisher network. The content is usually sales oriented and is designed to pre-sell a visitor on our clients products or services.
We embed up to 5 links to the clients website within the content of the HMP.
The combination of having keyword optimized embedded links, located on a relevant page, hosted on a relevant site, is a very powerful one.
I will stay away from making any bold claims, since I cannot give any actual examples publically, due to privacy concerns (if any of you would like examples please contact our sales staff). However, I will say that it is our most advanced and effective link building product, and we have clients doing extremely well with them.
Here are a few key points.
- HMP's are algorithmically no different then an article and thus would be extremely hard for the search engines to detect through an automated process.
- Because HMP's are optimized for the clients keywords (usually long tail keywords), they have the ability to rank well and drive traffic directly to the client’s site.
- Many of our clients also like to use HMP's for Reputation Management. They optimize them for their company name so that they can own all the top spots for their own name in the SERPS.
The ability for HMP's to rank well, while being a huge benefit, is also one aspect that makes them very controversial.
HMP's are basically piggy-backing on another site, using the pre-existing juice of that site to rank well.
Some people see this as basically buying doorway pages on someone elses site.
The implications of this are pretty profound. A brand new site could take advantage of organic search engine traffic by simply leasing space on another person’s site.
The potential for abuse is also huge, and it is something we are already addressing.
First, and foremost, we do not accept advertisers who we feel are spammy. This includes advertisers that are running MFA sites or low quality affiliate sites.
We also limit the number of pages we will host for any 1 site. In most cases our clients only purchase 1 or 2 pages per inventory partner. The most we have sold is 10.
This is much different then what happened on Wordpress. For those of you not familiar with that case, wordpress was found hosting thousands (around 120,000 actually) re-written articles in order to generate tons of traffic from the search engines for a man paying them a lot of money. These articles were not relevant to the site and were clearly designed to focus on high paying keywords. I.E. Mortgages, Debt Consolidation, Insurance etc..
(BTW, I am a big Wordpress fan. While this incident was a big deal, they resolved the situation with grace, and they continue to develop one of the best opensource blog software on the planet. Thanks guys!)
On top of everything the articles weren’t even original, they were low quality and rewritten based off other articles.
This is much different then having a few well-written and original pages hosted on a relevant site.
Why am I going into all of this? Well, I think it is important for us to distinguish ourselves from those that would abuse the practice.
The search engines are obviously going to track down and ban sites that are hosting thousands of irrelevant, unoriginal pages. On the other hand, there are many respectable sites currently hosting pages for other companies, and those pages pose little threat to the quality of search engine results, when done properly.
Thanks for the explanation Jarrod. Very interesting stuff.
I would be curious to see if anyone out there has purchased pre-sell pages and how they think they have worked for them.
Anyone?
Hey James,
a bit late on the board, but still my 2C are that I am doing 80% of the link buys of my own projects ONLY with presell pages !
The whole discussion if disclosed inventory hurts or not is actually just as side-aspect in my opinion. If you read up around 1,5 back in my blog I spoke about the "VIPS" technology and got similar stuff confirmed by a google engineer at the Google Dance 2005 - they LOOK at the page and anyone who believes that Google DOES NOT understand that a bunch of low quality cluttered links in the footer or the nav bar help the same way as links from withing the page content is wrong.
Whenever you want a test, go out buy a normal "text link" and a presell page on say rather similar strong sites... and you can do that test for a long-tail phrase, not "health insurance" or "bad credit" or "buy viagra" - I mean something reasonable to be changed after 3 months... then wait at least 3 months, unless your own site is super-old
Then judge on the results... the aspect of having an additioinal entrypoint actually helps even more and haven multiple sites ranking pages to send you traffic certainly helps - those are LEAD GEN pages par excellence... they PRE SELL the client... hence the name presell page
hmm - enough ramble... cheers,christoph
Hey Christoph -
I was wondering if the Presell Pimp was going to show up. :) Thanks for your input...you should have my contact info, so feel free to send some info on your presell stuff my way via email.
Much appreciated.
To be honest, I don't think it matters if your inventory is public or private - it's all about whether you're over the radar or not. There's no such thing as confidentiality in the face of a backlink check on Matt Cutt's laptop.
My suspicion is that Google are mainly keen to ensure the sites with the most influence - authority, PR, whatever - are the ones to manually clamp down on, while the lower quality site links with less influence are to be filtered by the algos.
2c.
I agree with your second paragraph. Sites with the most influence are definitely targeted first. Which is why lower/middle PR sites that are relevant, and not whored out, are the best long term investments.
Your first paragraph, while true, misses the point. Sure, it is possible for the Google spam team to sift through billions of websites with billions of backlinks in order to find link sellers. But why do that if they can just view a list on a link brokers site? The point being that if you are listed on a link brokers site, there is no doubt that you are selling links. On the other hand, if you just so happen to be linking to a few relevant websites, and you aren't advertising that you are selling those links, there is very little chance that you will trigger a link selling flag.
Jarrod, are all TLB sales entirely anonymous, and buyers never know which sites their links are going on?
ADDED: Simply because I've never used the service and not sure how the process works.
Brian,
Here are the steps we take to insure confidentiality.
1. No site specific information is listed publically or in bulk to any advertiser.
2. We must approve an advertisers site and credentials prior to showing them any inventory. This insures that the advertisers site isn't spammy. It also allows us to judge if the advertiser is serious, or just fishing for information.
3. We limit the number of sites that we show any one advertiser. In most cases we will only show a couple. If we feel comfortable with them we may show slightly more.
4. We do not allow our inventory partners to link to us, in order to prevent search engines from using our backlinks to track them down. When we find an inventory partner not following these rules, we ask them to stop.
5. For some premium sites we have agreements where we have to show them the site prior to ever approving the advertiser to see the URL of the partner.
I decided to experiment with TLA with a site of mine that had recently suffered majorly in the hands of Google. I thought I would see the effects of buying a link on a highly authoritative site as I had nothing to lose.
My link, with very specifically targeted anchor text was placed in the footer (in a 'sponsored links' type area) of a very popular American newspaper, with countless backlinks from authority sites. Now I truely believe that Google in particular can detect such obvious paid links, but I was interested to find out whether the authority of the site would override the placement of the link, or still disguard it.
What actually happened was after a few weeks the ranking for the targeted phrase dropped by pretty much exactly 100 places. I though at first it might be a coincidence but a couple of months later, with the link still in place, the rankings remain the same. As (deliberately) no other on / off page SEO has been done to the site, I can't see any other conclusion than te site having been penalised by Google for link buying. Of course there is still a chance it was coincidence, and I will leave the link live for the near future just in case, but I'm not hopeful!
Heapseo,
Sorry to hear your having a bad run at it.
I have never seen a site get penalized for buying only 1 link before.
I have seen sites get penalized for over-optimization of link text, having too high of a percentage of paid links versus natural ones, and buying too many links too soon for a new site. But, even in those instances the number of links was very large and in most cases there were other underlying problems with the site itself.
If you want to PM me your URL, I would be happy to take a look at your site in order to analyze it for penalties. I'm batting .1000 right now for fixing broken sites :) ..
Thanks Jarrod, appreciate it.
I am not saying by any means that the site was / is perfect (nothing blackhat btw), it seems that the addition of this back link was the final straw (for Google in particular)!
I'm a new poster here - don't seem to be able to find a PM option. If there is another way to get the URL to you let me know, I would really appreciate an outsider's view!
Hmm, I though there was a PM, looks like there is'nt. Go ahead and email me at jarrod (a)(t) textlinkbrokers.com.
Glad to help!
PM options... I don't think I can get Matt to go for that as we're a blog rather than a forum, but I know TW has 'em. At the least, we'll try to have contact info acessible via folks' profile pages in the new version (for those who choose to make it public).
Ya, probably no need to create a PM system, but having the contact info available in the profile might prove to be convenient.
It's already there - just click "make my email public" in your profile settings and it'll appear on your profile page
Excellent,
While I find myself hesitant to add my email to yet another site to be harvested by email spiders, it seems the pros would outweigh the cons.
Besides, I'm already filtering through 500 spam emails per day, whats another 100 or 2 :)
Thx for pointing that feature out Matt.
Could it be that you're suffering from an OOP because you have too high a percentage of your incoming links utilizing exactly the same anchor text?
It's interesting that you still see these links on the sites of many of the top SEO bloggers, as well as pointing to a lot of the sites they optimize. That should tell you there's still some mileage to be had.
You can still get some pretty good results out of buying links, but if you can log in and see the network, you better believe Google's webspam team can too.
So you should be aware of the risk/reward balance and know when you're pushing your luck. In my experience, the main risk is paying for a link that doesn't do anything, although I've seen the occasional (but pretty rare) penalty.
We've actually been writing about this exact topic on searchenginenews.com for a little over a year now.
The only difference between TLA and Adsense is that TLA influences the search engines. No matter how you justify your link building I believe Google will not budge on this.
I for one am really really excited to have Google deigning from on high that paid links are bad. Since Adsense is not about paid links. They have fixed the spam problem in their indexes so I'd like them to run my life.
Rand ... excellent point you make. I mean ... common sense isn't it? Here is who is willing to place links on their site for $$$ .... Google would be dumb not to consider this. Hey and here is our inventory. Nice!
I am glad I didn't have to use any of the "Text link broker" services. Even if they work for some today ... they'll be the first ones to be devalued when the time comes.
Great article! I am doing research on text link brokers as we speak, in anticipation of an overhaul in link building strategy. Our company recently canceled all of our TLAs and I was just looking into TLB. I am a bit concerned over this, and it isn't the first time I've noticed that a broker will share inventory.
It makes perfect sense that advertising link sales is the easiest way to get popped- so the question becomes, if you do seek to buy links for SEO, how in the world do you find them? I guess the (proper) answer is "Don't."
I'm glad you brought this up. ;-)
Great but I do not know where Google would punish this way in PR like they have done with TLA and PPP?
oh ok so this article has now disappeared.
I had to find it by searching for "my penguin punched your Volvo" ;)
I went to write a comment about disclosure regulations in 'viral marketing' being enforced by the FTC (with this link) and it ended up on the wrong thread (though in a way, still applicable)
Rand, you'll notice that - the details are accessible from the JavaScript mouse-over - there are no URLs in the listings, just site names - Google won't devalue TLA unless it builds an algorithm to detect link brokers and devalue their participants
As you see, there are some barriers to Google at TLA and until Google learns to cope with them (and detects sites, selling links with 100% accuracy among them), the sites will be fine.
Btw, I haven't found the reference to Matt slamming TLA in the link. Care to point it out, or quote here?
A.N.
The easiest way to track down a link broker is to check backlinks. Both TLA and Linkworth have affiliate programs. A simple linkdomain: command in Yahoo reveals thousands of Inventory partners that are also affiliates.
The easiest way for a link seller to get dinged is to advertise they are selling links. The easiest way to advertise you are selling links is to put a "buy links here" link pointing to a link broker.
This should not concern link buyers that are looking to purchase links for traffic, but those that are purchasing links for SEO should stay far away from sites that advertise they are selling links.
Google has no problems with blocking a sites PR. Especially since 99% of people dont even realize it.
The good news is that when you get links on sites that arent blocked, they give you that much more advantage.
You see Jarrod, though Google may use humans to do this, it'd be harder for them to use complete automated process to do this. Becides, not everyone who sells links is an affiliate (or at least people may want to remove the affiliate links when or after selling them).
While I agree that Google may detect backlinks, this process doesn't give G a 100% guarantee on link seller detection.
That being said, anyone buying links (and the link buying guide probably says that) can be flagged by buying links aggressively (a lot of links, same anchor text, from high PR websites). That is, you need to buy such links so as they would fit in your natural linking profile.
Or better yet, buy links for traffic only (and use TLA as another form as advertising, instead of PR, as Rand's update says).
Performancing seems to do the same: https://performancing.com/partners/advertisers...
Hi Emil,
Performancing is a traditional advertising network. And a very impressive one at that. I've got to give those guys kudo's.
They do not claim to be good for SEO, and they price their ads based on traffic not link popularity.
Performancing is for traffic, and nothing else. I've heard nothing but great things from both advertisers an d Partners. I Was even considering buying some advertising for some of my own sites though them.
Personally, on the publisher side of things I've taken the approach that I want to add value to the advertiser by giving them a good placement the same way that I would do for AdSense. In fact, the AdSense link unit can be nicely replaced by TLA. The more value I can provide advertisers, the better IMO.
I think that TLA is obviously more of a premium advertising product where you do get some SEO benefit, but if you buy properly, you can get some real traffic, which is the point of links in the first place.
As far as showing the actual publishers, I think that makes a lot of sense. If anything it makes them seem more reputable because they aren't hiding what they are doing. They are selling link placement on sites. It's that simple. Any SEO benefit is simply a bonus. Also, the links are sold at a premium, so I don't think people are buying links for PR value alone. There are too many other low-budget or free links to be had that paying $25-100 per link doesn't make much business sense as far as gaming the PR system is concerned.
Blackbeard,
It sounds like you got your act together. If the price of your links can be justified by the placement and the traffic alone, then it sounds like a good deal to me.
There's nothing wrong with SEO as a side benefit as long as the advertisers see it that way.
Blackbeard ... I am going to complement you on your "branding" of yourself. Blackbeard ... ties nicely with the pic, site's design, etc. Nice job.
Only concern is ... what do you do when your wife asks you to get rid of it .... or when your hair becomes grey, or when you get tired of it .... man you're now married to your beard. :-)
Good job.
P.S. What I am going to do is shave my hair off and brand my self as "Baldie" and place a pic on top of my blog. Oh wait ... isn't that Shoemaker?
Rand .... sorry for the irrelevancy to the post.
I sell ads through TLA on various sites and can't speak for my advertisers about the search value received from those links (though people almost universally renew each month). I can say that the text links I put on those same sites to my own sites (not through TLA) certainly help search rankings, particularly in Google. This evidence is clear enough that I can say with certainty that TLB's claims are bunk. It may be that some sites are penalized, but I doubt that has anything to do with their association with TLA.
Greg - I'm not suggesting that GG is already penalizing everyone who buys from TLA, I'm saying that they're making it way too easy for Google to penalize if they wanted to.
Besides that - if you could get a real "penalty" rather than simply having the link "not count," we'd all be buying TLA inventory to shut down our competitors.
Greg,
Google has a manual review process. When a site gets flagged for review, a human will visit the site and will judge whether there are enough violations to warrant a PR block.
If a link seller is selling only relevant links, isnt hiding them in the footer, isnt selling dozens of them, and isnt publically displaying that they are "links for sell" (which really ruffles Googles feathers), there is a good chance that they will pass a manual review. Regardless of whether they are listed in a link brokers inventory or not.
Unfortunatly, Link sellers are only human, if they get offered a buck, and the site isnt completly lame, they will take it. In addition, if they can increase sells by placing a link to a link broker, they will often do it. Thats when things go wrong.
There are plenty of sites in TLA's inventory that still pass pagerank, I know of a few of them personally. It's just hard to expect inventory partners to be educated or responsible enough to turn down money in order to insure that the clients are getting maximum seo value.
Others have noticed this before, as they've been showing their ad inventory for a while. In some cases it may help their sales, sure. But in some cases it may hurt them.
I've been a long time "white hat" SEO who has been tempted to buy links at various points in time. I've reviewd the TLA site many times, and love the interface. However, the ability for Google to discount and/or penalize these links is what has kept me from getting more serious about potentially purchasing links for clients.
1) Even without showing the URL, they show screenshots and the name of the site. Many times I've spent 15 seconds doing a couple of searches and have been able to identify the sites TLA has inventory for and then I've gathered my own data on those sites, never having purchased though.
2) While TextLinkBrokers may do better to hide this a bit more than TLA, I still think they aren't much better. What is to prevent someone at Google from signing up with TLB using a personal email account so they can see the inventory? Nothing. Why wouldn't / couldn't they do this? Exactly.
Ephricon,
To respond to #2. Our in-house policy is to limit the sites we show to any one client. In most cases, unless they are a trusted buyer, we will only show a few links at a time. While this does not prevent them from spying on us, it does slow them down tremendously.
Yes, your p.s. is right. It does sound very much like a plug for TLB. However, the bigger question is, unless you are becoming business partners, why not get your site hosted on your own rather than partner with another business and create some potential conflict of interest situations?
I'll give the full details on the TLB deal in the near future, but no - we're not profiting from their sales in any way, and the hosting deal makes a great deal of sense.
I purchase quite a few links from them, but very few pass any ranking at all. There are enough high quality blogs that the traffic from some can pay for itself, but I have never seen any significant effect on ranking. Many of the sites show up doing a backlink search, but again, very little observed effect in the SERPS.
Also, if you purchase enough links from them, you are able to see the url of every site in their inventory. I can see a url in my account right below the description. I'm not sure how frequently they allow users to see url's, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has this feature turned on.
Yep, TLA is definitly trying to move towards the traffic model, and I commend them for that. But, the reason they are TLA and not Adbrite, Quigo, or Adsense is that they make claims about search engine rankings.
Lots of claims, all over their website, in their link buying guide, and everywhere else.
People buy links from TLA because they believe that they will get an SEO boost.
How many of their clients buy links with the assumption that they are buying them for Traffic alone? 2%-5%?
How many people would still buy a $50,$100,$200,$500 link that was placed in a location where it would get little to no traffic if it was'nt for the SEO value?
Anyone want to take a poll?
I only bought a TLA link once, and yes, we did it for the traffic. But I gave it a unique anchor text to be able to test if it gave any SEO juice. Nope. But, nothing lost anyway. Traffic sucked though, for over $5 per click and only 18 visitors in one month, I quickly pulled the ad!
Why hide what can no longer be hidden? :)
Aaron,
I think trying to do the right thing for our customers is well worth the effort. It is not true that it "can no longer be hidden".
As with anything, Google only has so much desire/resources to penalize sites for selling links for SEO purposes.
They are not in an all out war against link sellers, but at the same time, when a simple report can be run to identify sites selling links, it is no hair off their back to flip a switch. Especially when you need to be a link expert to even spot a PR block.
And, while this will just sound like a bunch of B.S. We pride ourselves on our editorial process. We turn down a lot of sites from buying links in our inventory. We our not trying to game the search engines by helping crappy spam sites to rank well.
We may be delusional, but we tend to believe that if we are only servicing legitimate sites, we are doing more good then harm to Google. Thus, they will be less inclined to hire people to pose as customers in order to reveal our inventory.
The other option is make our inventory public, remove our editorial process (which would allow us to cut our staff), Invite all of our inventory partners to participate in our affiliate program, create automated systems that place link boxes accross our entire inventory (which creates a network signature), and probably end up Quadrupling our income.
Why don't we do that? Well that is the question we ask ourselves at least once a week. Half of our partners believe we should, but the other half (including myself) believe that our customers trust us to do everything we can in order to insure that the links they buy have a fighting chance to help their rankings.
TLA inventory is hidden until you log in as a member, is it not? Of course that leads me to wonder how well they scrutinize the membership. Do they make any attempts to keep search engine people out?
We buy TLA ads. However, I do not like the fact that many publisher sites have TLA affiliate links on their sites. We avoid those kinds of ads. Also I don't buy ads where the publisher makes it obvious(to a search engine)that it is a paid link by placing html text such as "Text Link Ads" or graphics with alt attributes that give it away. What I see more and more publishers do is to use a graphic to indicate they are paid ads but not give that away to a search engine by using alt attributes or even a file name that would reveal its true purpose.
Finally we do try to monitor the effectiveness of each ad placed, whether they help with rankings and if they actually send traffic. The latter is the easy part while the first is more difficult to gauge, especially when there are many efforts that could contribute to good search visibility.
I still think the graphic badges to "PayPerPost" and "ReviewMe" on sites are reason to avoid advertising with them. If they ever came under manual review, boom, busted -- or at least less trusted.
I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years GOogle builds a robot that can actually see and recognize graphics! Some kind of A.I....
We are all overlooking some key points in this discussion, imo. Why is Google so determined to find your "inventory" and devalue it? Why have we created an environment that needs to be kept a secret? Perhaps because if you let any advertiser under the sun by a link on almost any site, then that poses a real threat to Google's results?
As an industry, "text link broker" companies need to think of the search engines as partners. You need to ask yourself before every link is placed - will this be good for Google? Does this site deserve to rank well for this term? For starters, affiliates should not be allowed to buy links. No one would use Google if they did a search for a term and the top 10 companies were spammy affiliate companies that redirected to some "larger" site.
Secondly, pay attention to relevance. If links are not relevant then they should not be approved. This is not about making a quick buck, or getting a quick boost in Google, its about creating a sustainable marketing strategy (and business) that can co-exist with Google (and maybe even help them).
Yes, this is altruistic (and maybe a bit naïve), but if we follow this notion of quality & relevance & integrity & ethics & what’s good for Google and their users – then maybe there wont be this cat and mouse game that the industry is bound to lose in.
I agree completly Seth,
I'm not going to sit here and claim that we are perfect by any means, but I can tell you that we are "working our asses off" in order to get there. Not just because it is good for our customers, it is just good business have successful clients coming back time and time again, with bigger and bigger budgets, because their newly found rankings are making them a fortune.
Selling links only on Relevant sites is a tough thing to do when a client comes to you with a $5000 budget, insists that "High Pagerank" is the only way to go, and our inventory only consists of about $1000 in relevant high PR sites.
When we get customers like that, we try to convince them that relevant, lower Pagerank links, are a much more sound long-term investment.
But.... You'd be amazed how many webmasters and first year SEO's actually get pissed when you tell them that you know more about links then they do :)
Well said. In essense, if you are seeking advertising on other websites, you'd simply consider the whole deal as another way to provide value to your visitors. This way, you'll be buying the (visible) link above the fold, from a relevant website with enough target audience to warrant traffic. You may neglect whether or not the link will be nofollowed then.
Such links will be fine with Google and you'll reap the direct target traffic benefit.
Late last year I advertised on Jeremy Zawodny's blog through Text Link Ads and my site got put in the penalty box.
It only took a few days for Matt Cutts and the entire blogosphere to pick up on the paid ads. Before I knew it, my site went from a PR7 with good rankings on several important keywords to a PR4 that couldn't even be found for my own branded keywords.
After 12 months of aggressive SEO and link building my site is doing a little better, but I'm still suffering from the hangover effect of Google's web spam team.
Buyer beware on any link brokerage service. Google knows about all of them... My conspiracy theory is that they sign up as customers to many of them to find paid link inventory.
The best way to buy links is to make private deals with sites not well known for selling links.
Quityourdayjob,
I couldnt agree more with that.
The second best way is to work with a link broker who makes privacy their highest priority.
The other things you can do to protect yourself is:
- Buy only on relevant sites - Stay away from buying links in link boxes where possible - Stay away from buying links located in the footer of a page - Use surrounding text, or buy links embedded in pre-existing text, or purchase entire pages instead of just links on homepages
While not all of our inventory partners agree with our philosphy of the "right way to sell links" we do try and preach to them the value in doing it the right way.
So all I need to do to get my biggest competitor banned is buy a text link on JZ's blog? Sweet! (Seriously... does this sound likely? Without more details I would be very hard pressed to believe one text link killed your PR)
For sure, there would be rationale enough that the traffic you would expect (depending on your industry) off of JZ's site justifies the cost of the link. If JZ neglects to nofollow the link and Google flags it as paid link spam, I don't think that's enough reason to PENALIZE a site...
On the other hand, a client of mine in the US did a "blogroll" type exchange on his site (link in the navigation menu) to an Australian site -- to exchange traffic as they serve only their respective countries yet both were ranking well in the search engines for given keywords. So this was essentially a reciprocal link, but after a month my client lost all rankings until we undid the link, everything came back. i would imagine that cancelling a text link ad would bring rankings back. Has anyone else experienced/tested this?
It's very possible that the JZ link was not responsible at all, perhaps it was some other reason.
TLA should get rid of the site names and the screenshots (maybe).
However, given the fact that urls are not listed, its hard to imagine anybody at Google bothering to sit down and penalise all the sites manually.
If Google do penalise the TLA sites then its not hard for them to request orders and urls from TLB as well.
There are two i's in Hawaiian.
Oops. Thanks - all fixed.
Ok, I found this conversation through a link of a link of a link of a link. You know the one where you read a story, it has a link somewhere and you go there, then follow a link there and next thing you know, you're a few states away from home. Back to this topic...
I HAD to put my "2 cents", as everyone likes to say, in. I am a business owner and was reading up on the whole text link buying / search results having process, which led me here. I've read quite a bit on it, but I have no idea in spotting Adam from Eve. What I can spot is a snake oil salesman and this Jarrod Hunt guy is a snake oil salesman.
First of all, learn to either use spell check or give up typing all together. Second, I find it funny that you would talk crap about other companies for your sole benefit...hence the snake oil salesman. You seem very shady and by having to talk smack on anyone else to make yourself sound better is very high schoolish. Then again, these days a lot of internet companies are run by teenagers, so I apologize about this comment if you are in high school.
Here is what really throws me for a loop; you talk all of this talk regarding how you are all about privacy for your customers. You reference these other places and point out how they are not conscious of their own customer’s privacy, yet, here you are on this site talking about your service and how private your customers are, even though you turn right around and say this information is provided to your customers. Being a person on the outside looking in, If I was this search spam team you speak of, I would rather come after your network rather than anyone else’s. It would be more of a challenge. Similar to how a girl likes the guy that hates her versus the guy that likes her. Maybe we can penetrate your steel walls, maybe we can't (“We” as a hypothetical meaning, of course). But something tells me money talks to someone who talks money publicly. (Oh yeah, it is publicly, not publically)
I'm sorry for jumping on your case, but I was hoping to learn more about this whole scheme for our own site and now I see TLB as a potential snake oil business. It seems to be a coin toss if this stuff works so rather than risk what we have now, I think reading this conversation has actually taught me to stay away.
I am officially a web nerd now.