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Buying Text Links and Advertising

Posted on | September 15, 2005 | No Comments

There has been a lot of discussion the past few weeks on Buying Text Links. Even Matt Cutts, Google Engineer, made a posting on his blog regarding this subject. Pay close attention to the follow-up comments people made. Matt basically says not to buy links / advertising to increase your rankings. He also talks about PageRank, but I will not even comment on that over-hyped subject.

It is up to each site owner to decide whether or not they want to purchase Text Links / Advertising. Yes, Google may try to filter sites for buying ads. This would cause major collateral damage to thousands of websites that have been buying advertising for years. In addition, links have been used for traffic since before the internet went commercial and long before Google’s creation. Google is now a public company that has to answer to stock holders. For this reason, I suspect they will not make major changes which would result in large scale collateral damage. The media would have a field day with such an event. Then stock holders would get upset, they start to sell and the stock is downgraded.

Consider the fact that since the industrial revolution advertising has been a driving force in our economy. Our economy has to get more people to buy more cheaply manufactured items to keep things going. One of the fundamentals of advertising is to build trust and respect. Only a few weeks ago Target purchased all the advertising for an entire issue of the New Yorker magazine. Why did they do this? They wanted to transfer some of the prestige and trust the New Yorker possess to their company.

That being said I would stay below the radar when purchasing Text Links / Advertising. Play it safe and focus on long term results. Look for sites that will deliver traffic that will convert to sales and old sites that will pass some of that “trust� that Target was trying to “buy� from the New Yorker magazine. It is also my belief that at some point the click-thru rates of Links/Ads will be given more weight in the algorithms. Links that deliver no traffic will be devalued.

Resources to Educate Yourself on Buying Text Links:

RandFish:
Mr. Cutts… Your Pants are on Fire

SearchEngine Watch Blog:
Sites Might Not Pass Reputation; Buyers Might Get Targeted More

Search Engine Watch Forum:
Matt Cutts Comments On Reputable Sites & Link Selling

RustyBrick:
Google Can Detect Some Paid Links

David Naylor:
Matt Cutts : link buying

ThreadWatch:
Google Admit Problems with Text Link Advertising

Feel free to leave comments or questions!

Category: Google, Link Building, Search Engines

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    Justilien Gaspard is a SEO/M consultant with over 8 years experience in organic search marketing. Professionally he's a columnist for Search Engine Watch, speaker at SES Conferences and has authored 3 advanced courses for SEMPO Institute. Learn more about Justilien.

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