The Sickening State of Text Links: October 2007
brandondrury
I have not purchased a paid link in 8 months.
Text Link Ads Wasn’t Working
I bought a PR 6 link from Text Link Ads. My site took things very slowly and naturally. I still plan on launching products with this site. (In my head I had made a “tentative” 5 year plan with full blown offline marketing plan, etc). After spending over $500 at Text Link Ads and allowing plenty of time to pass, for a search term that I would call “very uncompetitive”, I started to question the whole Text Link Ads business model.
Did I give Text Link Ads a fair enough chance? I think I did. A PR 6 pointing to a site that ranks for an uncompetitive keyword should show some results after 6 months. I should have saw some benefit for my money. I’m not the kind of guy who gets impatient about SEO.
I also have to say that I didn’t like the fact that $250 of my money went to Text Link Ads. This REALLY bothered me. I would have rather paid $300 to the real webmaster than pay HALF to Text Link Ads.
Digital Point Link Sales Worked Temporarily
I looked down at the few other links I had purchased on Digitalpoint Link Sales. I thought they were pretty good deals when compared to the Text Link Ads situation. Then I read a Matt Cutts blog about how a digital camera site is not exactly relevant to a photography site. I got mad and said “THAT’S A BUNCH OF CRAP”…..(I later changed my mind).
A few months passed and I noticed that my links purchased from Digitalpoint Link Sales disappeared. Why? Well, it turns out that, me being the idiot I am, I forgot to renew them. On top of that, the sellers must have just removed the links because I never got an email asking me to renew my links. YUCK!
Of course, buying a links is a long term bond. It’s almost like a marriage except for the boredom and divorce. A text link only starts to really kick in after it’s been on your site for a long time. I wish I had a few PR 6 links that had been pointing to my sites for 5 years!
When those sites dropped my links, I lost everything. I would have kept those links running for as long as I could afford to. The second I lost those links I pretty much lost my money on the whole deal. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep track of all the links I purchased. This was a HUGE flaw for me. Even though I was the buyer, I should have tracked them down and renewed them. I never made the time to do so.
Looking back, the Digital Point Link Sales text links were not nearly relevant enough. Not even close!!! The buying Entertainment link is not nearly good enough for a movie site. A movie site should be getting links from other movie sites.
When We Started To Look Into the Text Link Situation
Security - So, we got the idea that we wanted to throw together a crappy little free Text Link System. (This was back when there weren’t a ton of crappy little text links systems). We started to take a closer look into what was really going on. We started to see that Google was asking webmasters to report paid links. I was expecting Text Link Ads would be working day and night to solve this catastrophe that would be the end of their business. I expected them to come up with an “Emergency Patch”. It never came. Even though Text Link Ads was easily giving away the identity of it’s links for sale and Vigilante Heroes were out trying to rid the world of the filth that is wrecking Google’s ranking algorithm, Text Link Ads never bothered to think about security. Text Link Ads never made a single step to improve the security of their links.
Of course, it wasn’t much better at Digitalpoint Sales. The 2002 system over there is to PM the seller and ask for the domain. AHHHH! Aren’t you giving the link away to Google? AHHHH!!
So then we started to think about all kinds of theories and concepts. Luke and I asked ourselves “What does Google need? How do we gauge the worth of a text link (or vote)? When we put ourselves in the mindset of “If we had a zillion dollar search engine, what we would do?” and it was amazing how STUPID the current system for buying / selling links was at the time. It seamed ridiculous to buy a link on ANY site at that point through one of the big text link outlets. It was a sickening state for Text Links!
- Text Link Ads didn’t care if their links would work
- Digitalpoint guys didn’t care if their links worked
- Neither cared if their links were detectable by Google
- Matt Cutts called out sites that just link to random junk in the footer back in 2005 yet no one seamed to car
- Everyone just went on with their day as if they were too busy to notice just SICKENING the situation was for text links.
My “Epic” Journey To Write Text Link Center
(Play inspirational Disney music….NOW)
So, armed with little more than my trusty old AMD XP 2000 computer, Dreamweaver, a Google’s worth of tutorials, and a dream I set out on a quest.
(Stop inspirational Disney music….NOW)
My Goals For Text Link Center
- I wanted a free system (We figured if we could solve the text link system for free,we could always monetize it with ads and products or sell it down the road). Your Ex-wife took half!! I definitely don’t want to be your ex-wife!!
- I wanted my DREAM SYSTEM for buying and selling links. In other words, I wanted a system that I felt comfortable using.
- I wanted a TOTAL commitment to security. TOTAL! I wanted links completely undetectable. The goal was to create a system that even Google employees couldn’t tell if a link was paid or not even when looking at the page.
- I wanted management setup so a person could buy a link and not have to waste time thinking about when it expires. I understand that “buy links” is on your “to do” list along with 40 other things and you cram in the link buying at the last second.
- I wanted a system where a seller didn’t’ have to think about when a link expired. When the link was about to expire, the seller gets a message to send a renewal invoice. That was simple enough.
- I wanted to break down categories to very small niches. I don’t want to buy a “Auto” link for my Shelby Cobra site. I wanted to buy links from other Shelby sites! (We aren’t quite that deep in categories yet, but we are working on it!)
Conclusion
You should be demanding more for your text links. You, as the consumer, don’t have to buy junk! You can demand a better product / service for your money. If you are unhappy with the sickening state of text links, you may want to try Text Link Center.
