Darren Rowse at Problogger wrote about an offer he received from someone wanting to buy text links on his website. The conversation is very interesting. Even after being told “No” umpteen gazillion times, the link buyer was persistent and kept upping his offer, going from an initial offer of $150 to $400 per paragraph.

Keep in mind that this offer was for a permanent placement, not a monthly recurring fee, and that each paragraph would consist of 4 or 5 text links. At $400 one-time payment, that would come to $100 total per link for a PR 5 website to help with the link building part of Search Engine Optimization. What a rip off. Darren breaks down his decision to refuse the offer this way:

• For starters it’s too risky. The examples that he gave of what he’d done show ‘paragraphs’ that to me obviously didn’t ‘fit’ on the pages. They stuck out like a sore thumb to anyone looking at them.
• Secondly it’s too cheap. $400 for a paragraph with 4-5 links in it makes it $80-$100 a link. This isn’t a monthly payment - it’s a one off for an indefinite period. Text links on pages with page ranks as high as the ones he’s targeting go for a lot more than this kind of rate when you consider that they often pay per month. Over time his $80-$100 a link is nothing at all.
• Thirdly it compromises the quality of my content. Even with the offer to write the paragraphs myself I’m not willing to link to sites that could have a dubious quality. This kind of thing can impact you on numerous fronts - Search Engine Optimization for one and reader experience for another. The sites you link to impact not only your bank balance but potentially your reputation.

I’ll have to agree with Darren on all three points. If you get offers like this to sell links on your website, your best bet is just to walk away. These aren’t real offers.

Imagine someone walking up to you on the street in your hometown and offering to buy your automobile - let’s say it’s a five-year-old family sedan with a luxury interior and only 20,000 miles on the engine - for $500 total. Would you accept it? That’s about what these offers are - ridiculous for any Search Engine Optimization efforts.

First, they undervalue your links. Secondly, they provide you crappy content that doesn’t match the content on your website. And, thirdly, if you accept the offer then you will likely see declines in your PageRank. Why do that to yourself?

If you are a relatively new webmaster, it might seem as if you are just spinning your wheels because you aren’t making any money, but you should think about your monetization plans before you build your site. Know how you are going to make your money before you build it. And stick to your plan. Don’t accept crappy offers from link sellers out to distract you. Here are a few tips for those of you who do want to sell text links on your website:

• Only sell on a recurring payment basis - never permanent placement.
• Learn the value of your links before you accept any offers and don’t sell any links for less than they are worth.
• Sell links for traffic value, not PR; then be sure to include a nofollow attribute in every link.
• Offer to write the content yourself so that you can maintain consistence of voice on your website content - if link buyers tell you that you can’t change their wording then walk away.
• Make sure the content matches the content on you website; if it doesn’t then refuse the offer.
• Examine the page to which you are linking; is it spammy? Does it link to other sites that are spammy? Are there other issues like potential warez downloads or malware issues? (Remember, you are sending your site visitors to that site and they trust you to make a good recommendation - if they get a virus because of your recommendation then they will likely never visit your site again).

Selling text links is risky business in a number of ways. Think long and hard before you accept any offers - even if the price looks attractive. Instead of making money you could loose with your long term Search Engine Optimization efforts.

I’ve got to hand it to Andy Beard. Here’s a creative way of getting around Google’s paid link policy. The search engine has effectively told webmasters that they will be penalized for selling links. Many webmasters have gone to instituting nofollow attributes on their paid links so that they aren’t penalized. That penalizes the webmasters buying the links as they don’t get any PR transference from those nofollow links. So will Beard’s Robots.txt solution solve his problem?

It’s possible, but not likely. Robots.txt will allow webmasters the ability to tell Google not to crawl their pages. If you have a page on which you link to other sites that have paid for you to do so then you can prevent Google from crawling that web page altogether. The page will still be indexed, but it won’t be crawled. And the natural follow up question is, “Well, if it isn’t crawled then how will be indexed?”

If there is even one inbound link to that page from anywhere else on the web then it will be indexed. Google may not crawl it, and therefore will not crawl the links on that page so it will potentially never discover that those links are paid links. But what Andy Beard is banking on is that his content being syndicated either by aggregators or scrapers - the first being a legitimate and ethical way of syndication and the second one being unethical. Either way, he wins, as does his link buyers.

Any content that is syndicated will provide inbound links from other sources. Google is unlikely to count syndicated paid links as paid links. The search engine won’t know that they are paid links on the syndicated pages. How would they know? They can figure it out on the original content page, but since it isn’t crawling that page it becomes a non issue. This is what Beard is banking on.

He says he hasn’t implemented the Robots.txt strategy yet. My bet is, if he does, then other webmasters will follow and will get away with selling links for some time. They will even figure out how to syndicate each other’s content effortlessly for a period of time. Eventually, Google will institute another policy. But short term, it looks like it might work.

It’s been three months since the last PageRank update and already Google has started exporting PageRank information. I’ve seen a few sites with increases in PageRank, but I haven’t seen changes in all of them so they may not be done yet. But keep your eyes on the PageRank of your websites and blogs because it may very well be coming.

Of course, PageRanks can go down or up so if you notice a decline in PageRank then you might want to do some investigating to find out why you went down. If you are selling links or it even appears as if you are selling links then you might want to do something about that. One website owner I know had a page - a single page - on his website drop down to gray, which is an indication of no PageRank data and not necessarily a “0″ as if so often stated, from a PageRank of 1. It is likely that he went gray because his page is a list of publications and at the bottom of the page he has a link with an application for other publications to “get more information” about being listed. While he doesn’t have sales information on the page it could be an appearance issue with Google that has caused the drop. Either that, or someone reported him for selling links.

In other words, consider this a warning and a reminder. Selling links isn’t necessarily bad. If it makes you money you just have to weigh the benefit with the penalty. But keep in mind that PageRank can go up or down and if yours goes down this time around you’ll have to look into it to find out why.

The following helpful advice was taken from Marketing Pilgrim. I think it sums up some very good advice for those of you that want to build up traffic through link buying. Link buying is a strategy that works, but is increasingly frowned upon and tends to fall into the black hat category these days.

• Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content. If you sell ring tones, that link from an online florist will stick out like a sore thumb!
• If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away.
• If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like that, walk away.
• Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it.
• Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble.
• Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker. Those “earn money selling links”banners? Yeah Google can see those too!
• Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you.
• Point the links at different pages within your site. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage.
• Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable.
• I guess I should round this out to ten. Don’t worry about buying PageRank. A brand new page may be highly relevant to your industry and rank well, yet the PR shows 0/10. Ignore that, PR takes forever to catch up.

These are some useful tips and if you are considering paying for links, then do make sure you go over them carefully. I think that the best piece of advice that can be gleaned from this is to be careful where you buy your links from. Your links are only as good as the reputation of the site that they are on.

Of course, the flip side to link buying is link selling. If you have a site with a strong ranking, it is possible to earn a great deal of extra income selling links. Do take care, however, as a whiff of scandal is all it takes to bring your page rank tumbling down. Why does Google frown upon link buying and selling, anyway, after all isn’t that what Ad Sense is all about?

TechCrunch has lost its PageRank. Duncan Riley explains why.

What it all boils down to is Google doesn’t like sponsored posts at all. Even if you don’t take money for your sponsored posts, Google could penalize you by taking away your PageRank just for saying that a post is sponsored. There are two ways to prevent this from happening.

The first way is to make your statement of adoration toward your sponsors a .jpg file. At this time, none of the search engines can crawl images so it will be safe for awhile. But there is no guarantee that this won’t change in the future.

A better way to protect your PageRank is to include the “nofollow” tag in all of your sponsored links. If you must mention that your blog posts are sponsored, even if you don’t take money for them directly, then be smart about it and put the “nofollow” tag in place. Otherwise, just don’t mention that your blog posts are sponsored. Just don’t mention it.

Do you sell links on your website? Is link selling one of the primary sources of revenue for your website? That’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with selling links. It’s not unethical or immoral. It’s a perfectly legitimate business practice. But it could cause you to lose PageRank, which will cause a decline in the value of your links.

Personally, I think you’re better off selling links for their traffic value than you are for their PageRank value. There are so many other ways of getting PageRank than selling links to pass on your PageRank really isn’t necessary. But getting targeted traffic - now that’s a different story.

If you have a high traffic website in a niche area then your links could be worth more than they’d ever be worth as PageRank transferrers. But if you do sell links and Google finds out, be prepared to see your PageRank go down - unless you do this one thing:

Include a “nofollow” attribute in all paid links. A “nofollow” tag tells the search engines not to crawl that link. By telling the search engines not to crawl specific links, you are essentially saying “Don’t transfer my PageRank to this website that I’m linking to.” If your paid links clients are buying links for the traffic instead of the PageRank, this shouldn’t matter to them. The way you add the “nofollow” attribute to your links is to add the phrase rel=”nofollow” inside the brackets where your a href tag creating the link exists. When you do this, you are protecting your own PageRank and the people interested in buying your links will buy them for the traffic. Everyone will be happy and everybody wins.