Can Paid Links Be Editorial Endorsements? Google Thinks They Can't. How Do You Think?

[TNX]

Paid links are not evil. They are just a tool which can be used or misused.
Yahoo directory and Best of the Web are examples of publishers using a high-quality editorial review process to ensure quality and relevance. In fact, Google recommends to buy a link on Yahoo directory! At the same time Google says they will punish everybody else, involved in buying and selling links. Why is that?

The difference between an average publisher and Yahoo directory is the choice of potential advertisers that Yahoo directory has. The variety of advertisers gives them an ability to choose most relevant advertisers and links.

An average publisher doesn't have a good choice of advertisers. This often leads to unrelevant links and bad neighborhoods. Unfortunetly, all text link marketplaces allow only advertisers to choose the publishers' websites. What if there was a marketplace, where publishers could choose from hundreds of potential advertisers for each page of their sites themselves? I think this could change the whole market! Publishers would be able to give their editorial votes to other sites - the thing that previously only the chosen ones (Like Yahoo) were allowed (and had a chance) to do. All links would be very relevant and this could even help increase Google algorithm’s overall relevance.

We worked many months to develop such a marketplace, where publishers could choose advertisers. This option has become available today. There is already a good choice of advertisers for your every page and it is becomming bigger every day. Do you think that selling links this way could be called editorial endorsements? Could this be the future of text links?

[MTbiker]

Most definitely. Reputable bloggers won't link out to stupid sites even if they get paid, but getting paid for linking to sites like normal would sure be nice

[MeetHere]

Paid links helps the publisher to earn revenue for which they pay hosting/domain, internet and other bills.

They are also the best source for a publisher to make "quality content sites"

If not revenue, why should publisher make a site.. ?
Nice topic..

[Trakker]

Awesome new option. Way to go! It gives more power to publishers to place relevant ads.

But most important - it may help ease my biggest fear about TNX - that Google will be forced to root out your publishers and penalize them.

If this new marketplace is even a little bit successful, there will be some of your publishers that are placing ads that are "editorially recommended", so google shouldn't ban them. That would then make it very hard for google to pick out the "other" publishers to punish.

Hope it works!

[anilg]

What bloggers face with most of text link advertising programs is that they don't have much option about the choice of website they are willing to advertise for. But this is not the case with TNX.

[IEmailer.com]

Originally Posted by MeetHere

If not revenue, why should publisher make a site.. ?
Nice topic..

I liked your point, really interesting... lol

[bravo404]

Ya Meethere makes a great point. And from my experiences with paid links let me give you all some advice. When buying links, only get homepage links. I dont know exactly why it's better, but my site always take forever to rank when i buy sitewide links. And dont buy too many at one time. If u want to buy 20, just spread that 20 out over 1-2 months just to be safe.