Buying and Selling Text Links

Text links have a higher click-through rate compared to banner advertising. Over time, advertisers have mostly abandoned graphic banners in favor of text link ads. Advertisers purchase links to improve their ranking in search engines and build website traffic.

Text link ads are basically static HTML links placed on high-quality, high-performing web sites.

The most effective way to use text link ads (as an advertisers) is to make your text links based on a keyword phrase related to the page on the website you are linking to. For example, a "blue widgets" text link would point directly to the blue widgets page on the advertiser's website.

This focus of text link/related page helps boost search engine rankings for that page for that related keyword phrase.

Selling text advertising is pretty straightforward. Someone pays you (directly or through a service) to put their link on your website.

Less scrupulous seller may employ the following tricks to keep an advertisers link from fully benefiting from their link ad. These include:

* Using a redirect through a URL blocked by robots.txt
* Redirecting the link through a URL using a 302
* Using Javascript to direct the link (search engines cannot read JS)
* Applying the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link
* Adding the Meta Robots = "nofollow" to the page
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If you sell advertising or sponsorship on your website, you should be upfront about what type of link your advertiser will get. Some advertisers simply want traffic, and may agree to forgo the SEO benefit. Other's won't. Either way, full disclosure is best for everyone.