Firstly I want to open up a general can of worms on this - i.e. how's it worked out for anyone who has done it. But more specifically my gripe as an observer is (never paid - never will = can't afford it)..... Why don't they tell you how many total links there are on the page? Surely people value a link from a PR7 with 80 links (internal or external) and a PR7 with 25 links... very differently. How can you promote the same pages on equal footing and only reveal that they 'only have 5 advertising links per page.' How does that tell you anything? In real life we are talking PR and links from many different sites - thats what people will pay for if they know their head from a hole in the ground... why don't they tell you how many links are on the page and break it down to internal and external? What are they hiding? How hard is it to detail such a critical factor?
A good text link broker will tell you if you make enquiries. Once you have become a good customer they will very often even mail you urls of sites you might be interested in placing text links on. - Michael
What is the risk in just putting the facts on the table in the first place - often they go into alexa rankings etc, who cares about alexa! The facts I would need to consider their different offerings would be theme, pr, links on the page/s, average unique's per month, dmoz y/n.
In Firefox you can right click on any page and select "View Page Info" and then click on the "Links" tab for a listing of all links on a page. It's a little crude as to you have to go through it yourself to see how many actual links are outgoing, or internal, etc. But it's a start. Although I think you were commenting on something else, this may be soemthing of use to you.
Dominic, this is something that plagues me too. My view is very simple. They're not stupid. They know what you need to know to make real sense of what they're offering. If they don't put the facts on the table it's because they don't have the confidence to do so. And I don't buy from a merchant who doesn't have confidence in their own product. It's basic common sense - go elsewhere. Cheers, JL.
Like brokers of almost everything they are allergic to extra work and if they gave out the url they are afraid that you will go to the site owner directly and they will loose their commission. - Michael