In true animal instinct to survive, ingenious ideas can be be stormed out from the brains of people to overcome any obstacles. Look at the software and music pirates. Microsoft can spend years and pour in billions to develop what they imagine will be a 100% fortified piece of software but on almost every occasion, hackers found ways to penetrate the fortress built around the software even before they can be officially launched.
In the same tone, Google might have thought they can flush out all the Link sellers by devaluing all the links sold through the recent massacre of Page Ranks. To a certain extent, they have manage to achieve some level of success, though many innocent bystanders got hurt. They were considered as the casualties of war, killed in the crossfire.
Their ranks dropped even though they don’t sell a single link mainly because sites that sells links got hit and unfortunately, these sites links to theirs, indirectly causing the innocent ones to have many irrelevant and low ranking in coming links. This makes their present high ranks unjustified. Inevitably, their ranks drops in tandem.
Link brokers sensed trouble brewing for the survival of their business and when their livelihood is threatened, human ingenuity takes over. Within a week after the crackdown and seeing the influx of sites pulling out as link publishers, Text Link Ads and Linkworth, the 2 giant Link brokers, offered a new plugin allowing publishers to sell their links in a very discreet and almost undetectable way. Advertisers will buy certain keywords within the article and these words will be converted to links, linking to their desired sites. Though this technology is not new and has been practised for quite sometime, the present scenario will definitely push the popularity of selling links this way to an all time high.
The latest to join the fray and taking this method of selling links is a site called DeWitt’s Media. (Google for the URL). Any blog with a PR 3 and above are welcomed to their fold as publishers. All their transactions are done very “cloak and dagger” style with approved publishers getting their “jobs” via the e-mail they registered. Funny they want to call it a “job” rather than an assignment. Very mafia sounding. LOL. Once the publisher receive the “job order” they have 3 days to accept of deny the offer. Rates are set flat at $10 per “job” and you are allowed to submit as many sites as you like to become their hitman, publisher.
I don’t know how the “jobs” will look like, but I figure publishers will be provided with a ready made paragraph with all the sentence and the linked text perfectly stringed together to appear like a regular post. All the publisher needs to do is to post the pre-made article. Could be just my imagination though, but I read somewhere that this method has indeed been propagated, with some very high ranking blogs being paid with 4 digit figures to insert these paragraphs within their post.
UPDATE: Just did a re-hash of the articles I read and found the article that i was referring to: Paid Text Links Paragraphs on High Pagerank Articles!
They have a very short, precise and to the point Terms of Service which reads like you are signing up for a top secret assignment with the CIA.
1. Blog Publishers should not reveal the link was bought under any circumstance.
2. Blog Publishers must keep the link on the blog, or website as long as the website exist, if the link is removed while the blog is still up, refund the money asap to us, or please contact us.
3. No contact should be made with the advertisers.
4. Everything must be confidential by every means regardless of city, state, or country.
5. You should not duplicate content under any circumstance.
6. All blog post should be unique and one of a kind.If any of the following terms are violated above the following below will take place.
a.)$500.00 Dollars for each fine.
b.)Banned from the contextual network.
c.)Banned from any other programs that Dewitt’s Media has to offer.
Though (b) and (c) are easily implementable, I can’t figure out how they are going to enforce the fine.
Well, Provision A can be enforced via a lawsuit, probably even in small claims court.
I can see new standards coming down the pike that will force us to tag each link. I’ve already started tagging links on my site with the VoteLinks Microformat.
I think this is way better. In fact, most other pp companies are OK if they don’t use the stupid tracking image. Yeah, and the script… you know from which big pp company lar.. *roll eyes*
Have you joined?