I can remember the first time I browsed the marketplace at Text-Link-Ads and thought to myself “it’s kinda strange I can’t see the sites I’m going to be buying advertising on”. And it was!

However, like a good sheep, I followed the crowd. Everybody else was doing it. I We should have known better.

The reason text link ads hides the sites is because if you can see the sites that means so can google. And selling text links the way Text-Link-Ads does it is bad in google’s eyes.

They would rather have you buy a link blindly and have no idea where it’s going instead of risking having google see the sites that are selling links.

Sound shady?

Today you can’t even see an image of the place you are buying a link, you have to buy it completely blind. CRAZY!

Imagine this

I’m going to advertise your blog for you, but I’m not going to tell you where, just give me your money! I’ll tell you where your ad goes later. LOL.

Oh yeah, and I’ll take a 50% commission from each sale. That is the text-link-ads proposition.

WOW. What were we thinking?

Text Link Ads Is BlackHat Seo

From the Wikepidia Definition: “Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.”

How do I know buying paid links is disapproved by the search engines? They say so:

some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

A bit more reading.

My opinion is that text-link-ads falls into the blackhat category by that definition and almost admits it’s guilt by hiding every site from search engines and humans.

What do you think?

I’m taking my ball and going home!

It’s sad that instead of evolving into something better now that google has penalized many of the sites using their service they choose to be stubborn and try and hide their activities even more.

People followed the text-link-ads brand so wildly because at one point they did make people money and made them feel good about it. Things have changed. Hopefully tla will also ;)