Text Link Ads - have you worked with them?
-
I work with a large group of community sites and we were approached by a company called Text Link Ads to purchase links on our sites for SEO purposes. This means we can't add "nofollow" and the resulting page is crawl-able. This goes directly against Google's policy but I think it would be tough to find out exactly what we're doing. It could be a great revenue source and this company has many, many sites they work with. That said, this sounds like what you say right before something bad happens.
So, two part question: Has anyone worked with this company before? And should these links be avoided or are they not so bad?
Thanks in advance!
-
A good call Josh, one that you'll surely benefit from in the medium to long term by not participating in selling links. Glad I was able to help you reach that decision
-
Thanks for the insight, that's really helpful. It sounds like it truly is a trade-off, in some cases you're just trading your ranking for money, not what we really want to do.
-
Great answer, Simon, thanks for taking the time to type that out. This was the direction I was leaning on this and it's good to hear an honest reply.
Paid links, in my mind, are at the lowest end of the "bad things to do" spectrum. It's still on the wrong side of the tracks but you see so many people getting away with so much, you can't help but to think, "hey, it's not that bad."
I think I've made up my mind, thanks for the push in the right direction!
-
Hi Josh, I've been working with them as a client and have experienced both positive and negative outcome of buying links over there. Text link ads are hiding your site details till someone really buys a link on it. The link becomes visible for the advertiser only if he/ she has purchases it. We have had successful campaign in the past. However the value for the advertiser changes in time as it is based on the actions of the publisher. If the publisher decides to place many links on a particular page they might cannibalize the results for the advertisers and also get deranked by google.So as a publisher you have to decide for yourself if you are going to make more money for a shorter period of time as your web page might loose some rankings or you can reduce that risk by getting a smaller sum for a longer period.
Also don't forget that Text Links Ads will be getting a large share of the money from you as a publisher. If I was at your position and if you have your own resources to manage the sales and link implementation I will definitely recommend it. However if you have the scale of sites but don't want to spend the time on it you can simply outsource it to Text Link Ads or another link brokerage platform. They are a good company that won't run away from business.
-
Hi Josh
This is a great question to ask and I will try to answer it as best as I can for you;
I understand the temptation here, which is as you've said, could be a great revenue stream. However with this comes a significant risk of devaluing your large group of community sites by selling out for a quick buck, which in all fairness is the measure of this.
Google's Web Spam team have many extremely bright people working hard on detecting this type of activity, that's what you'd be up against. I wouldn't fancy my chances of getting away with it unnoticed for any lengthy period of time and I believe that for any credible website, it's too high a risk to take, that's the revenue vs the risk of penalty for selling links.
Yes many sites take this risk and many have so far gotten away with the extra revenue with no downside, however logic says that it's only a matter of time and come that time, a lot will regret their original decision to sell links.
You're perfectly entitled to do this, just bare in mind the harm that a severe ranking penalty could do to your group of community sites and weigh that up against the extra revenue you could make.
(I haven't worked with the company that you mention or any similar company, though I do know people that have and I do know the risks associated with doing so. I'm not risk averse, I just don't like gambling when the chances of loosing are too great).
It also depends how you feel about ethical SEO, which is basically not trying to play against the system, not trying to manipulate the search engines. There are those out there that do love to, the so-called grey hat and black hat SEOs and sometimes, they suceed. It's just personally, not something that I'd feel comfortable doing, I much prefer to play the game fairly, which takes longer to get there however is far more sustainable.
Again though, it's a calculated risk that everybody is entitled to make, if it fits in with your strategy and goals, maybe it's the right thing for you to do. That's your call.
Hope that helps in your decision process,
Regards
Simon
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Buy domain, redirect, get all the good links (+link juice) and disavow the spammy ones?
There is a domain for sale that has a quite nice profile and a lot of good backlinks, but also quite a few spammy ones. This domain has a Spam Score of 14% acc. to Moz Link explorer, ours has only 2%. My questions: 1. The domain and the good backlinks are related to or close to our content/keywords. But we are worried whether the "spammy" ones will hurt us. Does anyone has experience with this? 2. Would it help if we disavow the spammy backlinks afterwards? And if so, how do we do that? Add new domain to search console, disavow the bad links and then redirect the entire domain to our domain or redirect the domain first and then disavow from our property? Many thanks for your help!
Link Building | | pissuptours0 -
If I disavow bad links on "disavow link webmaster" will they still show up on my moz reports?
We recently found out we have a lot of bad links linking back to our website from spam sites, I disavowed them through the google disavow link webmaster. On my moz report it still shows the links, is that normal?
Link Building | | Ryan.Cruz0 -
No-follow Links - Do they work for SEO?
Seems like some of the big sides only give no-follow links now are they still useful for building link authority? Do you have any experience? Thanks
Link Building | | seoman101 -
Back link from site with DA of 72 to a website domain. Clicking on the link redirects to our website not the attended one.
Hi,
Link Building | | JIMBO16
I've ran a back link check and discovered a good back link to a site which then gets redirected back to my company's website. I have a feeling that an old SEO agency has purchased a small website which has a decent link back from a relevant organisation with a high Domain authority and then redirects the domain to our website to get the link juice. What are your thought on this? Is this really bad practise and possibly damaging? Thanks, Jim0 -
Does profile links work related to offpage SEO?
Hi All, Does profile links work related to offpage SEO? My website was linked to many profiles on sites and wanted to know if i need to cleanup or leave it as they are so they benefit? Thanks
Link Building | | jomin740 -
Internal linking anchor text with automated ASP.NET link building
Hi Everyone I really need some help here, the problem I have must be one that many have. I have a simple e-commerce style website so 1 product page can in fact get 40-50 internal links to it. These links come from a mixture of: 1. The parent category pages that the product sits on (Rugged PDA) and in turn the 10 filter pages of this category page (Rugged PDA, ordered by battery size). 2. Alternative product list on other product pages, So many products link to each other as alternatives. From Google analytics we can see that visitors like to browse product to product seeing 5 alternatives on each page with titles like "Smaller", "more rugged" etc. 3. Manufactuer pages, so we have a link to each product from each manufacturer home page where we talk lots about each manufacture we resell. We also have links from images used in the website. So its a nice usable website but we're finding that Google is still telling us in Webmaster tools that it thinks some links are dubious and we're trying to find out why. We only now have 190 external links to the website, most are internal and from the website or our blog on a subdomain. The problem we think is that we generate the category and products pages all dynamically so the anchor text is looking the same. Will this potentially create issues for us? Dave
Link Building | | Raptor-crew0 -
Should I Pay For Link Removal?
Hi, I'm in the middle of a link removal campaign and getting a lot of replies from site owners asking for payment or directing me to a link which is effectively a payment page. The way I see it is my client is paying me to do their SEO. I'd rather be spending my time and their money building quality links, therefore the link removal process is in my way and requests for payment an insult. However, I am not without sympathy for site owners being expected to remove links free of charge. After all there's absolutely no incentive for them. So far I've had a zero tolerance attitude towards this and refused to pay, but just wondered what everyone else's opinion was. On the other hand, many site owners have been very helpful and removed the links at my request. Is it the right thing for me to remove these domains from my Disavow Links file? I'm finding it to be a bit of a moral conundrum to be honest!
Link Building | | Matt_Wilson0 -
Sidebar Links
If I have x number of posts with sidebar having popular posts. Will each post acts as a link to popular posts? or will be penalized for site wide links? Thanks, Venkee
Link Building | | Venkee0