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Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads are potentially dangerous if you are using them to spam or manipulate via trying to pass PageRank or Link Juice to your website, but they also offer some valid uses for business if used correctly. The problem is that many of the link buying services encourage the use of very aggressive all you can eat strategies for quick fix solutions which encourage spam like behaviour and get their clients flagged by Google/Bing quality teams for trying to manipulate search results. A large number of the text link ad services also seem to be based exclusively around WordPress/Drupal blogs which limit your potential market and increase the chance that one of their other links might be flagged and lead to the discovery of your text links.

I found that of the more public platforms Linkworth has some tools that try to provide some guidance on how much a site can expect to earn if they made the decision to sell links.  They have a simple 7 point ranking platform for sites based on their overall popularity.

  1. Limited
  2. Average
  3. Good
  4. Very Good
  5. Super
  6. Elite
  7. Monster
The problem with their platform is that you can see its almost impossible to find a site that is ranked higher than 5 on their scale.  The value of the links is also massively undervalued considering the referral traffic that such a link would generate for the advertiser.
LinkRank 5 (Wikipedia/Google)
Homepage links $33
Sitewide links $44
LinkRank 4 (News.com.au)
Homepage links $27
Sitewide links $43
LinkRank 3 (TheLostAgency.com)
Homepage links $26
Sitewide links $42
LinkRank 2
Homepage links $25
Sitewide links $41
The value for homepage and sitewide links are also a very strange metric as these while very valuable are often not that common when requesting or buying links from a website. The likely earnings for selling links is fairly low considering the increase risk for your site as it is fairly easy to spot the plugin many of the automated platforms use to display the links dynamically.  Consider what is worse adsense that has no impact on your organic rankings and you can earn money or sell links and potentially get dropped from the index and lose a large chunk of your website traffic. Linkworth does have an interesting set of link products which seem to cover most link types available for advertisers considering purchasing links:
  • Text Link Ads
  • In-Content PPC Ads
  • Hosted Content Ads
  • Banner Ads
  • Directory Submission Service
  • Paid Blog Reviews
  • In-Text Ads
  • Multi-URL Rotating ads
  • Press Release Services

Must of the related search queries around the phrase “buy links” tends show that there is a strong aversion towards looking for locations and sources to purchase links.  Some of the top related queries shown:

  • purchase links
  • buy relevant links
  • buy permanent links
  • buy quality links
  • buy one way links

Looking at the organic results around that search term show a mixture of high risk volume strategies being promoted, the use of software, link systems and link brokers.  The market is obviously split between advertisers (buying links) and publishers (selling links).  The issue is that many of these platforms are often filled with low quality, risky site, non-relevant sites, and sites/blogs made just for selling links.  These typically only benefit a websites short term rankings and don’t deliver much secondary benefit such as referral visitors.

The general feeling is that if you want to buy links accept the risk if you want a quick gain but more benefit can be found from spending that money on a longer term strategy of content creation which will continue to provide benefit long after its written, become an expert in your niche and you will reap the rewards.