The Truth About Text Link Ads and Google

It's no secret that Google isn't a big fan of text link ads. And some people might be hesitant to purchase or publish text link ads because they are afraid of being penalized by Google.

Well, here's the straight poop.

I've been in the SEO game for about 10 years now. Before I got into the brokering business, I first used text link advertising as my primary focus to build up a PC game e-commerce website from scrtatch to a pr5, 1000 visitor per day business that I sold after 2 years for $25k. Later I worked with a fortune 500 company to help them establish an ecommerce website, and we used text link advertisements as our primary means of establishing a strong web presence. They are still going strong, several years later. Today, I work for a fortune 100 company that everyone here has heard of, and text link advertising is an important part of our link building campaign and SEO efforts.

I started AdhocAds.com leveraging what I had learned about SEO and link building. Today, I buy and sell over 100 text link ads per day, and I feel well qualified to give you my honest assessment of link building through text link ads and Google.

The truth here is if advertisers and publishers are very careful to only purchase and publish links that are related to their own site, and the sites the ads are published on and are linked to are high quality, with original, unique content, then there's no reason for any penalty from anyone.

The sites that I have seen penalized for link buying or selling are for either buying links or selling links to low quality, unrelated sites, or for using code that the publisher places on their site which is designed to 'automatically publish' the link for them whenever an ad is sold, ending up in links to low quality, unrelated sites being published without the publisher even looking at the link first. This 'automated code' is easily detectable by Google and other search engines. THESE THINGS are what Google objects to most.

Text link ads sold on our site are 100% reviewed by publishers before they publish them. The publisher is responsible for making sure that they link only to quality sties related. They should never link to sites made for advertising, or related to warez, porn, or gambling.

Also, publishers manually publish the link, so that can place it in content, or on the site naturally, rather than having it in a section the 'automated code' that screams 'UNRELATED TEXT LINK ADS HERE'.

Finally, publishers are encouraged to never sell more than a dozen text link ads, so that the content to outbound links ratio remains in good standing with Google.

In the 10 years that I've been in the SEO business, with hundreds of thousands text link ads purchased and sold, I've never seen a site penalized for buying or selling text links when they followed these rules:

- SCRUTINIZE closely every site you link to. Make sure it has original, unique content.
- Publish links only to RELATED SITES. It doesn't have to be exactly the same, but it need to be in the same general category.
- MANUALLY publish the links, scattered throughout your content
- LIMIT the number of links you sell. (~10-12)

Follow these rules, and you'll be successful in your monitization efforts.