Everybody and their mother knows that Google frowns on paid text links as a way for webmasters to buy link juice for their sites. So it turned out that 2007 was the year that most of what’s known as text link advertising died. Most bloggers are so scared now that they put no follow links on all their link ads.

(By the way, if text link ads are being discouraged, why does TLA still have PR7?)

scared-kitty.jpg
image credit: w@ndering_st@r (Flickr)

There is another way to do sell text links which is virtually undetectable to Google. Some people call it content hosting or presell pages.

By the way, Bob Massa’s blog (where I found the term ‘content hosting’) is one that you should read and keep in your feed reader. Lots of good insight there.

The way it works is that you contact the webmaster or blogger directly and ask them if you could pay them to have some of your content and links put on their site as part of a post.

It’s like product placement on TV shows. Or like how you see the judges on American Idol always drinking Coke. That’s content hosting for you.

This way your links will look a whole lot more natural than if they are a part of a list of text links on somebody’s sidebar. That’s just screaming out for Google to get you.

I’m sure there is already an underground market for such a thing. If you target a well established blog to host your content, you get both the benefit of the traffic as well as the link juice.

That’s all the more reason to expand your inventory of sites so that you have a stable of sites with various PR values that you can use content hosting to introduce your newer sites. For the more advanced, you can spread out your hosting and also your IP addresses.

The key is keeping things looking natural. Some people think you’re trying to game the search engines. I think you’re just trying to figure out their rules and play by those rules.

Here is an image that I came across on Flickr. I’d like to call it Determination.

determination1.jpg
image credit: J Quantz Jr. (Flickr)

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Popularity: 29% [?]