LinkXL Lies To Its Advertisers
By Matt Jones on Mar 24, 2008 in Blog Marketing
After reading the review of LinkXL on JohnChow.com, I felt duty-bound to investigate further about how a link buying site tries to make themselves look legit.
Gone are the days of TextLinkAds.com when bloggers where unaware of why selling links could be considered gray or even black-hat. This is due to the Google Toolbar PageRank slaying spree a few months back (which still continues).
Google has succeeded in educating bloggers about selling links, but they have failed to raise awareness among advertisers.
Disclaimer
As far as I am concerned the ‘moral’ issue here is irrelevant. This is about money changing hands and the difference between the advertising industry and the link building industry. I have no problem with bloggers selling links, only when brokers are deceptive to their members.
What Is Wrong With LinkXL
On the LinkXL about page it says (and the wording of this is very important), “LinkXL™ allows marketers to organically grow their web site’s link popularity and search engine ranking through contextual text link advertising.” (emphasis is mine).
Increasing your search engine ranking and advertising are 2 very separate things. LinkXL are merging them together in the attempt to attract a portion of the marketers advertising budget, rather than only receiving their smaller SEO budget.
More Deception from LinkXL
LinkXL says that due to the advertisers being able to buy relevant text links, they are actually helping Google, and I quote, “With LinkXL™ links, advertisers are able to purchase extremely relevant text links that drive traffic while serving the algorithmic needs of the search engines.”
There are seemingly endless examples for me to quote on the LinkXL Homepage where they say things that are simply not true. They even say say to bloggers that the links are natural and, “not sponsored”!
Is this a joke? Are advertisers actually going to be tricked into thinking Google wants them to use LinkXL?
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It’s a bit of a grey area, but looking at the review, it does allow Google liked links:
“Note that the paid links served by LinkXL — which can be set as either nofollow or dofollow — are only placed within the content itself. They do not sell links in the sidebar or the footer.”
So it DOES allow nofollow, but you’re quite correct, it is deceptive, as nofollow doesn’t build SEO.
True they do allow advertisers to buy links with nofollow, but that is only to placate bloggers. Their business model is based around selling links from all pages of a blog, most of which would send 0 traffic, rendering a link worthless if it has nofollow on.
I think you are getting carried away on what the linkxl marketing pages says, rather than what their system does. I have noticed all link broker sites try to be very careful in how they word what they sell. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Even though, I am always happy to sell high dollar footer links to advertisers with lots of $$, I have been pushing buyers to buy text links in content for years. Not only is it cheaper, it work great for SEO and is much safer than buying links in the footer or sidebar of a web site.
The only problem it is a major pain to find and buy links in relevant indexed content. Because it’s easy, advertisers and publishers continue to buy and sell footer links that may or may not get them in trouble.
For Google’s algorithm, a relevant link in content serves them much better then a an irrelevant “Credit Cards” type link on the side bar of a totally unrelated site. But, you’re right, Google will ever recommend linkxl - especially since they sell links that they can’t algorithmically track.
Google will not only never recommend them, but from the look of things they are already penalizing them. They don’t appear for the own name anywhere on the first page!
The main problem of selling and buying links is that they are not relevant. If the link brokers would be looking at that better then looking at how many money they could earn, it would change a lot!