Buying Text Links : An article by Jill Whalen
Posted in SEO For Blogs, Website Crackers by: ChetanThere’s nothing wrong with purchasing an ad on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is good. Advertising it on popular sites where your target market hangs out is even better. After all, the name of the game is to bring in targeted traffic. Your advertisements on other people’s sites are none of the search engines’ business and will not get your site banned or penalized. They will not hurt your site in any way. How you market your site is completely up to you, and you don’t need to worry about the search engines if you decide to purchase text link ads.
So what’s the big deal?
Here’s where it gets tricky. A good portion of ads that are bought on websites are not purchased for the targeted traffic they will bring, but as an attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of the site being advertised. No big news to you, I’m sure, and no big news to the search engines. Since having a popular site can often help with natural search engine rankings, people have been looking for cheap and efficient ways to boost their site’s popularity for years.
Ya gotta do what ya gotta do — but so do search engines.
To the search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone found a site useful and wanted to tell others about it. This may very well have been true at one point in time many, many years ago. But today a link could mean something completely different. A link might be a simple trade between webmasters, or an ad, or even a vote *against* another site. With no way for a search engine to really know the intent of a link, things have really gotten complicated for them.
Ads used to have tracking links so that webmasters could measure their return on investment; however, today’s text linkers often prefer to keep the tracking codes off because their web analytics software no longer needs them. And besides, if you’re going to buy an ad, you might as well get the possible link popularity credit that comes with it. That’s more likely to happen with a plain old, stripped-down href link.
Unfortunately, this is wreaking havoc with search engine algorithms. On the one hand, they know it’s not their place to tell people whether they should or should not advertise on other sites — especially since most of the engines are advertising companies in their own right. On the other hand, without any way to figure out which links are truly a vote for a site, and which are simply a paid ad, the relevancy of the search results for any given keyword phrase can be skewed towards those who are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
More can be seen here : http://www.highrankings.com/buyingtextlinks.htm
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