Buying links is one tool used by SEOs for years… in fact some people claim that links are 99% of the game … but there are some “news” found by renowed industry experts…

Today I came across a post by Rand Fishkin who seems to have found out that you can see the sites to buy links on an Text-Link-Ads (only due to their image snapshot, not due having trusted advertiser privileges, those see all the urls anyway) while you do not see the inventory at Text link brokers (unless you got the trusted advertiser flag set)

Hmmm – so if I got the “trusted advertiser flag” on TLA and see all the sites’ urls and I got the “trusted advertiser flag” on text link brokers, then I see all the sites URL as well – what’s the difference? Congrats Rand on finding that out.

Well, it’s much better than those jerks from AdvertiseU that send out their spam to all domain registrar emails selling links on their “entreprenour.com” PR8 domain and other publicly announced and SPAMMED domains.

Long story short – Text link brokers claim to be the only text link sellers who do not disclose the inventory to buyers … they even got a claim on their site saying “No other broker or text link seller goes through such lengths to protect it’s inventory” ... well – for simple text link sellers like LinkWorth and TextLinkAds that might be true, but not so for presell pages… so if you are into buying presell pages then definately the statement above is wrong… PresellPageMan is even forbidding to link back to the broker per terms&conditions or you will lose your presell page… and there doesn’t seem to be a thing like a “trusted advertiser” flag at presellpageman.com – nobody sees the sites.

The whole SEOmoz post looks like it’s made up just to promote the new partnership and discredit Text-Link-Ads … I mean the promotion could be done anyway… but probably nobody would care if Rand would post – hey, SEOMOZ got a new parter – text link brokers pay for our servers… I don’t like that type of hidden ads.

Anyway, who the hell is still buying links alone anyway ? I mean you need single naked text links in your mix – but definately that’s only a fraction of the advertising media you need to work with…

DON’T BUY LINKS alone, if the are simple footer links, cluttered together with other low-quality links

BUY PRESELL PAGES and get multiple links WITHIN the content of a page linking to you … the trust of the domain that this presell page is hosted on will help your site and the links to you

My ramble to answer James question is pretty clear:

I’m refering to this post on confirmed block level analysis by Google or the MSN research paper on block level analysis for example

Conclusion:

• if you believe that naked links are better because they are not disclosed it’s just half of the story

• if you are only buying naked links and never engaged in presell pages, then you are definately missing out on great opportunities for SEOing your site