From time to time I receive emails out of the blue ask­ing me how much I would charge for a text link on my site.

Per­haps you’ve received sim­ilar emails your­self and have been temp­ted. After all it sounds like easy money doesn’t it? But hang on a mo, there’s a catch, so before you sign-up to any­thing, a word to the wise.

These emails gen­er­ally are writ­ten along the lines of the fol­low­ing example:

“Hi,
I was won­der­ing how much you would charge to advert­ise on your Machinery & Engin­eer­ing related site. I am look­ing to place a small text based ad. If the price is afford­able I may buy more than one over time. I usu­ally ask for one line with just a few words. I prefer them at the top, middle, or bot­tom of the main con­tent area of the site. How­ever, I am sure we can work out placement.

Please let me know what you would charge me to place a link ad on your site.  If you are inter­ested let me know the price and if you prefer PayPal or a check?

Thanks”

The first thing to note about this par­tic­u­lar email is that it’s not been sent to a named indi­vidual – sus­pi­cious in itself. Nor does it men­tion my web­site URL, again dodgy! Fur­ther­more the sender thinks my site is related to the “Machinery & Engin­eer­ing” industry! Durrr!

All reas­ons in my book, to hit the delete key and shout-out “begone!”

How­ever I real­ise that some people out there may be taken in with the thought of gen­er­at­ing a bit of rev­enue from their web­site, simply by whack­ing on a few text links on it. After all, where’s the harm in that, sounds like easy money?

This arrange­ment is called “Paid Link­ing” or “Paid Links” and is a tech­nique used by some ropey search engine mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists, to manip­u­late the search res­ults of Google and other search engines, in favour of the sites they are try­ing to pro­mote by cap­it­al­ising on Google’s PageR­ank concept.

The tech­nique of “Paid Links” is frowned upon by Google and many of the other major search engines and if your site is deemed to be tak­ing part in the prac­tice by dis­play­ing unre­lated, paid links on your site’s pages, you risk your site being pen­al­ised by Google which could mean your site being dropped from its index altogether.

Quite frankly, it’s not worth the risk.

So if you don’t do so already, the next time you get an email sim­ilar to the one above prom­ising easy money; flex your delete key stabbing fin­ger and get rid of it.

Here’s what Google says on the mat­ter of Paid Links.

Other Posts Sim­ilar To This One

• Search Engine Optim­ise Your Product Pages with the Product Name
• Web­site Mar­ket­ing and Man­age­ment Improves Your Bottom-Line
• Does Your Busi­ness Web­site Need Search Engine Marketing?