After the recent PR Update that seemed to crack down on sites that sell links, John Chow wrote a good post about selling links under in a Google controlled internet. Basically his advice is as follows :

Make sure links are related to your blog. Having links that are unrelated to your blog is one of the biggest paid link tip offs. Keeping your links related to what you blog about will help you stay under Google’s radar.

When I first applied to TLA, I noticed that they required sites to be of a certain PR or Alexa ranking. I didn’t like it, and I felt that this would be a loophole for abuse by members. Apparently I am correct but who am I to shout “I told you so” now.

I’ve noticed that many bloggers are just soooo greedy that they take on EVERY advertiser, whether they were relevant to their blog niche of not. This is one of the things that Google hates, so yes… everybody who has taken the time to learn about SEO knows that the first rule of linking out is to link to relevant content.

Upgrade to the latest Text-Link-Ads (TLA) plugin. If you are running an old TLA plugin, then you need to upgrade to the latest one right away. The latest TLA plugin doesn’t have function tla_ads in the codes so publisher running the new plugin won’t show up on the hit list.

If you don’t know if your TLA plugin is the lates, check your HTML souce, then look for the term “functions tla_ads”. If it shows up, then you have the old plugin.

Don’t label your links. Labeling your links with “Sponsored Links” “Advertisements” “TLA” “Text Link Ads” etc. just screams for Google to bitch slap you. The best thing to do is not to label the links at all. If you must label the links then do it with an image and not text. The image can say whatever you want it to say because the Googlebot can’t read it. This doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. For that reason, you’ll want the image to say something along the lines of “recommended sites” or “sites I read.”

I respect John, but I must caution that this borders on “grey”. Using image links to avoid Googlebot’s notice is an old trick that will pass automated crawls but NOT human checks. If a human were to manually check your site (don’t think that Google doesn’t) having an image link like this may make things work and give the reviewer the impression that you are trying to cheat.

Google has targeted Text Link Ads publishers because TLA is the biggest player in the link selling business. Many publishers link to TLA under their paid links using “Your Link Here” or “Get Featured Here.” The bot can follow the link to Text Link Ads and conclude that you are selling paid links.

The easiest way to avoid this is to remove the link to TLA. However, this could reduce link sales. A way around this would be to hide the link behind a redirect and add a nofollow and noindex to it. The bot won’t see text link ads in the URL because it’s behind a redirect and it won’t follow the link because you put a nofollow on it. Hell, it may even conclude that you are following Google’s guideline on putting nofollow on sponsored links. OK, that’s probably wishful thinking.

Many webmasters this technique because they believe that who they link as affiliates is THEIR OWN business and not Google’s. However, remember again that Google seems to be intent on cracking down on paid links. They will surely use manual checks as part of this process and a redirect hidden behind a nofollow will not get through a human check.

I believe that if Google wants to continue waging a war on paid links, it IS going to use every method at its disposal. I suggest you use the techniques described above ONLY after you have decided clearly in your mind that you WANT to continue selling links. To each his own. All the best!

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