10 safety tips if you sell links
I saw several reviews blaming text link marketplaces, like , TNX.net and others for making sites selling links banned from Google. To be honest, all text link stocks are just tools, which could be used by publisher to find proposals from advertisers and, in some cases, to automate process of selling links. Remember, that those companies are just playing role of middlemans and they are doing it quite well. You are the one responsible for the safety of your website.
After you read safety tips, scroll to the bottom of the post, where you find links to the reviews of various text link marketplaces.
Is selling links safe?
The short answer is no. If you sell links your site can get penalized by Google and/or lose its rankings. You must accept that fact before you choose selling links as a way to monetize your site. But, if you will follow the tips presented below, you can reduce chances of getting banned to a minimum. In addition you have one possibility to recover your site’s rankings.
Tip №1. Setting proper objectives
At first sight, the primary goal of any monetization strategy is to maximize revenue. It’s not completely true. When you put ads on your site, you must follow some rules. For example, not more than three ad blocks on the page, no ads on pages without content, no messages asking your visitor to click on ads and so on and so forth. When selling text links you also must stick to the rules. The only difference is that those rules are empirical. No one can say you exactly how to act and not get banned. All those rules are derived from the experience of many webmasters as well as from my personal experience. So the right objective when selling links is to maximize revenue, while keeping probability of getting banned close to zero.
Tip №2. Greed is you worst enemy: keep number of paid links less than or equal to 2 per page
When website’s owner signs up to some text link marketplace and start getting revenue, they can be temped to raise income by selling more links from individual pages. Safety tip here: two or less paid links per page. One per page is even better. Simple calculations shows that its better to earn money selling links for years and see rankings of your website grow than put too many links at once and get it banned right away.
Tip №3. Paid links are still ads
Paid links are still ads, so lay them out on page properly. Don’t put them at the very bottom of the page, blend them with background or hide them. Do manage proper decoration; don’t let them ruin your website’s design: paid links must organically fit in your pages.
Tip №4. Think of value for advertisers
Be honest with yourself and advertisers. Those buying links from you expect to increase their rankings in search engines and increase organic traffic. If you help them doing that, they will keep placing text ads on your site and you avoid links blinking. So, don’t mark paid links as nofollow, don’t use cloaking techniques to hide them from search engines, don’t put paid links to the very bottom of your pages, etc.
Tip №5. Avoid paid links to be easily detected
There are many paid link detectors on the Internet, which pretend to detect paid links automatically placed by text link stocks. They use the following simple principle. Automatic systems bind sold ads to URL of the page. The trick is that the same page may have different URLs. I.e. two different URLs http://www.seodragon.biz/monetization/10-safety-tips-if-you-sell-links and http://www.seodragon.biz/monetization/10-safety-tips-if-you-sell-links?qwerty lead to the same page. The parameter of the second URL is just ignored. But from the viewpoint of automatic system those URLs are not equal and it’ll load ads only for the first URL. For the second one it will load no ads. To protect paid links from being detected using described approach, make your URL uniform. For static websites one can just cut URL part going after “?” sign. For blogs one can use permalinks or canonical URLs.
Tip №6. Sell less ad places at higher price
If you can set prices, its better to choose strategy when selling less places at higher price. It’s much safer for the website and better for advertisers: they get places of better quality (less external links). Also, by setting higher price you can adjust links selling speed to safer level.
Tip №7. Don’t add too many paid links at once
Some of the automated text link marketplaces (e.g. TNX.net) allow selling ad places at very high speed. It can be not safe for the website, so publisher must artificially limit selling speed then. Concrete values depend on various factors: total number of pages on the site, their rankings, etc.
Tip №8. Don’t mark natural links as nofollow
Don’t mark natural links as nofollow in order to decrease number of outbound links. It looks quite unnatural to search engines. Moreover, at the moment Google distributes link juice among all links on page; both do follow and no follow. The only difference is that link marked as nofollow doesn’t pass weight to the destination page.
Tip №9. Acquire your rankings by natural means
It’s much better, if you get your ranking naturally. Create interesting and fresh contents and ask webmasters to link to your website. Such an approach if much more stable, than if you buy links to raise your rankings. From my personal experience, sites getting their rankings naturally are more trusted by search engines and have less chances to get banned (of course, if one follows previous tips).
Tip №10. Paid links are only monetization scheme, not the purpose of your website
You must have heard it thousands of times, but I’ll repeat, because it works. Your site is meant for visitors, so keep its contents fresh and interesting, its design user-friendly and remember, that paid links are only a monetization scheme. If you make the website only to place ads, its unlikely to be much trusted by search engines and can easily get banned. If you make a website for visitors, it’s likely to get high natural rankings, good traffic and gain confidence of search engines, which makes selling links safer business.
Reviews of text link marketplaces
Now, when you know how to sell links and stand safe I would like to present several reviews of text links marketplaces.
- TNX.NET review: sell links from every page of your site.
