Is it possible Google could catch on to these funny tactics? I signed up for TNX but saw they were linking out to some shady directory sites and it kind of scared me... I don't wanna get banned. Any other suggestions for building links on a 4 month old e-commerce site that doesn't require too much work?
Google is majorly cracking down on paid links at the moment. Whether they are doing this using human editors or by algorithms is still unknown, but my guess is that they are using a bit of both. Paid links are easy to spot, especially if they are unrelated to the site that is selling them. Another problem with brokers like TLA is that they use a widget on peoples blogs to place the links. My guess is that it is only a matter of time before the SE's figure out this code and discredit all links from this source. Another area that google is cracking down on are directories. Google recently penalized a lot of directories by preventing them from ranking for their name and by reducing their pagerank. There is a good article on it at seomoz My advice for link building is to try and find directories in your niche that don't accept any old site. Submit to DMOZ and Yahoo directories, if you think that your site would be accepted, fix those problems beofre submitting. Another method that i find to be particularly useful are link building through blog posts. Contact bloggers in your niche and ask if you can sponsor a post from them. If you build up a good enough rapport with them you can even ask to be a guest writer. If they accept you must write useful content and don't overkill with links back to your blog. Hope this helps get you started!