Scam Text
Link Advertising
When Google decided to downgrade the rank boosting effect of
link exchanges, it spawned an extraordinary demand for paid text
link advertising. The birth of the paid text link advertising
industry is the most significant event in search engine optimization circles.
Links had been monetized for sometime, but with link exchanges still having relevance
in Google's algorithm, the industry just didn't have the clear cut value on a
dollar cost basis. When link exchanges bit the dust, that all changed.
This may or may not have been Google's intention, but the end
result for millions and millions of independent Web site owners was certain. They
would have to pay other web site owners to link to their web site. Those who didn't
pay the piper would find their web site and business existed only a lonely hard
drive. It's promotional and communication value was ceased.
Currently, text link advertising
is big business. Hundreds of Web sites now offer paid text link brokering and
millions more offer to sell links on their sites. Buyers of these text links however,
innocently believe that their purchase will lead to high ranking in Google and
much more traffic to their Web sites. Google's recent update though showed that
they are learning how to control the effect of paid text link placements.
If you're thinking of purchasing thousands of dollars worth of
links, you might be wise to consult with an SEO consultant to help improve the
odds that they will work.
The recent Google results show something very interesting. There
are sites with hundreds of inbound links with low to medium pagerank. In the past,
that large number of inbound links would instantly mean a PR of 6 or 7. Some sites
lost inbound links as recorded by Google, and actually gained in pagerank.
So, the ability to select and then evaluate the rank boosting
power of paid links is very important. Sellers hawk their links with talk of pagerank
when pagerank is not the key value. Others laud their site with a measly pagerank
of 3 and 2 inbound links like it was the bargain of the century. It's time to
dig out and read again those old stories of snake oil sellers back in the 1800's.
Text Link Delay Factor
Added to the paid text link problem is the fact that Google's
algorithm has a time delay or aging factor. That means
that when you buy your text links, you will not get credit for them right away.
Instead, the credit will only be granted gradually over time. So although you
may beat the natural ranking system by buying your links, you will have to pay
for many months before they make a difference in your rankings.
Some text link advertising is easy to spot as advertising. Isolated
text links occupying an isolated spot separate from the main body of text is a
dead giveaway that they are paid. Often the topic of the link isn't remotely associated
with the site it is on. When the link has no descriptive text following
it, or the link text isn't part of a natural sentence form, Googlebot can easily
detect that it is fabricated and not a real recommendation of the site linked
to.
So, as you can see there are a lot of people out there buying
text link advertising and not getting good value for their money. It takes skill
to determine which sites will be accepted in Google's backlinks to your site and
which will pass pagerank and the right link reputation. There are actually some
computerized, rough methods of calculating the value of a link to your site. Rough,
because no one knows Google's real algorithm and how information is passed from
one link to another.
If none of this makes sense to you, you'd better hire an SEO
company to do the work.
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