6 replies to this topic

[Wyoming]

We operate a network of community websites, and apart from running Google's Adsense ads, we really aren't making any money from them. We're looking into the possibility of selling text link ads. I do have a couple of questions and would appreciate your advice.

First, we do have clients we link to because we want them to get a benefit. We recommend them, or have done work for them, and we want their rankings to be as high as possible. Would adding sold links to our website hurt those "natural" links?

Second, there are dozens of text link brokers out there. Any advice on how to tell the good or legit ones from the bad? If you have specific recommendations, please e-mail me... but it's hard to tell a quality link broker from a con artist just based on a website. What should I look out for? Any warning signs of a bad one... or tips to recognize a good one?

Thanks for your help.

[jehochman]

Wyoming, you need a business plan. The only real reason to sell/buy links is for the traffic value. Google is non-plussed whenever they find people trying to sell PageRank, so I wouldn't base my business plan on that idea.

If you have good, targeted visitors, of course you should give them links to things they would like. A solid recommendation is a valuable thing that will incentivize your visitors to keep coming back. Offline example: good magazines won't run just any old ad. They have advertiser requirements to ensure relevancy and quality.

Whatever you do, don't link to crap. If you do, you damage your site in the eyes of visitors and search engines. Always remember that search engines are artificial intelligence systems. They try as much as possible to simulate the responses of actual humans. If humans like a site, so should search engines. The whole point of a search engines is to quickly generate a list of high quality websites about a particular topic.

[Jill]

I'd be careful using any text link broker, as most of those paid links leave footprints.

See my article on buying text links for more info.

[Wyoming]

I very much appreciate the advice. Thank you! This does lead to a question, though. What is the difference from a search engine perspective of an Adsense ad with a link through Google to an advertiser, and a paid text link going somewhere else? Both are paid advertising. If both are identified as sponsored links, do the search engines make a distinction?

This also leads to your comment, Jill. Do the Adsense ads leave a footprint similar to paid text links?

[Jill]

Do the Adsense ads leave a footprint similar to paid text links?

Adsense ads don't count as backward links, so it doesn't matter.

[Bernard]

I don't have any experience using a text link broker, but it seems so to me that you are putting a lot of trust (ie. risk) in a 3rd party when you give them control over content on your site. Since I'm a control freak, that doesn't work for me.

I've sold some ads for one of my personal sites at the digitalpoint marketplace forum and hand coded them on my page. I keep track of the ad orders with a simple Excel spreadsheet and so far, it's been a win-win situation for me and the advertisers. I get to screen/control who my site links out to and the advertisers are getting some decent traffic (the page in question has been digg'ed to first page before and well represented in the web 2.0 sphere).

[Alex Choo]

Hello,

I would encourage you to sell links to sites that are relevant to yours. Google is getting smarter about detecting sponsored links.

Be careful when you use a broker. Prices are inflated because they need to earn their commissions. They may or may not allow you to reject ads that appear at your sites.