For those of you that enjoy a great challenge, the v7n community is running a new one where you must get top placement for a unique and typically unsearched term (V7ndotcom Elursrebmem). John Scott is the editor/owner of the v7n network. My apologies for confusing him with another guy from there!! “Doh!” Sorry Tim!

Anyhow, the object of the contest goes like this:
These terms found here: http://clueless.webguerrilla.com/seo-contest

v7ndotcom elursrebmemThe rules for the competition are as follows:

1. In order to win the first prize, you must place first in Google (organic rankings) for the search term on May 15, 2006, noon, Pacific standard time.

2. Prizes for 2nd place through 5th place will be awarded based on web page placing in the corresponding positions in Google on May 15, 2006, noon, Pacific standard time.

3. For the purpose of this competition, indented listings in the SERPs will not be counted.

4. In order to qualify for the prize, a web page must include one of the following:

a. A link back to the V7N home page.

The link can be in any manner you wish, any anchor text you wish, with nofollow, without nofollow, JavaScript, cloaked or fried up and served with potatoes.

b. One of these Official V7n SEO Contest banners:

The banners may link to V7N, or not link to V7N. Linking the banner to any domain other than v7n will disqualify the contestant.

Just to make this very clear, the banner may be unlinked. You do not need to link the banner graphic to v7n. For those who do not speak English: you do not need to link el-banner-o to v7n-o.

c. The following text:

We support v7n.com

Please remember, in order for the web page to be compliant, it must contain at least one of the elements listed above.

If datacenters show different results on the 15 of May, the winner will be declared solely at the discretion of V7N. If there are any disputes as to the validity of the winner declaration, V7N will be the sole arbiter.

The Prizes for the competition are as follows:

First Prize:

$1,000 from v7n
$1,000 from Stoner3221
$2,000 from ShoeMoney
iPod from g00gl3r.com

Total: $4,000 + iPod

Note: This amount does not include the $1,000 from Greg Boser, the $1,000 from Todd Friesen or the $1,000 from Mike Grehan. We have no assurances that they will pay, nor are the conditions of payment announced. Stay tuned for updates.

Second Prize:

$500 from v7n

Note: This amount does not include the $500 from Greg Boser or the $500 from Todd Friesen. We have no assurances that they will pay, nor are the conditions of payment announced. Stay tuned for updates.

Third through Fifth Place Prizes

$100 Each from v7n

Note: This amount does not include the $100 each from Greg Boser and Todd Friesen. We have no assurances that they will pay, nor are the conditions of payment announced. Stay tuned for updates.

One of the crazy twists to this contest is the “Greg Boser” character that feels it’s wrong for them to require a link back to their site. It’s not like their asking for free links, there is a large prize in the end, but I guess everyone is entitled to their own opinion. You know the old saying, “opinions are like elbows and asshole’s. . .everyone has a couple!”. So my response to this Greg POSER cat is that he sounds a little bitter. Maybe because he didn’t think of the idea? It just seems very childish to act such a fool over a contest someone is doing. Of course, my favorite part of the entire thing is how this guy offers his own contest to list without the links to v7n, yet point the links to Matt Cutt’s blog. HA! So what he said was, no, don’t do what he is doing, but do what he is doing and while you’re at it let me shove my nose up Matt Cutt’s tailgate and brown it up.
Well best of luck to v7n and I hope the contest is a successful one. We are actually participating in the contest, however, we’re doing it for testing of a theory we have. If by chance our test is listed well, we’ll happily pass the winnings on to the next person.

Sometimes if you try to really understand the crazy brains of search engines, you can have a complete brain lockup and fall asleep instantly 😀 . One thing to understand is in the Google realm, you are trying to understand the thought processes of phd professors who feel that the world just is not complicated enough for them. Matter of fact, the way Google gets these brains interested in working for them is they place billboards or ads out in the public that makes no sense to the typical human brain, but it actually has a hidden message in the ad only geniuses can figure out. Once the brain discovers the message, it will tell them if they figured it out, Google wants them. These are the people you are up against in trying to understand how Google works.

Of course, along with these genius types, there are also the normal typical techie nerds that are a lot more like us. Combine the two and things tend to get a little more understandable. So the point of this rambling is I thought I would explain how the googlebots learn and detect many aspects of our websites.

There are two definite parts that can penalize or ban a website; humans and computers. The human editing is obvious common sense. Someone, usually your competition, runs and tattle tells to Google if you’re doing something wrong, they visit your site, find the issue and penalize your website. The part that might take a little thinking is the computer side of things.

Computers that learn are able to learn based on patterns. Something that is repetitive is typically a way anything can learn. Haven’t you heard the old saying, “Tell yourself something at least three (3) times in a row and you’ll probably remember it later”? A good example is trying to remember someone’s name. If you do not repeat it, you might not remember it. If you say it a few times quickly, your chances of remembering are much better. Well, our brains are just like computers. Computers can learn if situations are repeated.

Now mind you, this is a very broad explanation. There is much more involved, but if you can grasp this notion, it might help you in preventing your site from being penalized for anything you do. Do not get involved with anything that involves an identical pattern one can easily spot. If you decide to buy text ads, do not buy them all from an identical network type or from the same ip address. Now we will always recommend focusing on buying text ads on like partner sites to boost your traffic, but the simple fact of the matter is, people buy text ads to help their link popularity. So since it happens, you need to know how to protect your online presence. If all of the locations you place your text ads are very similar, you run the risk of being detected. There is no guarantee they will catch you, no matter what those google people say, but there is no reason to risk it.

There are other text link broker services that offer links on sites that all have the same layout, linking structure and link placement. These places are easily being found by Google and while we hate to see it happen to our friendly competition, it is happening. This is the great part of LinkWorth due to our partner listings being unique site by site. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us and we will be happy to answer what we can.

The LinkWorth Team wants to wish all of our customers, readers and everyone else a special holiday season. As there are many celebratory occasions, here are a few of the well known greetings. . .

MERRY CHRISTMAS

HAPPY HANUKKAH

HAPPY QUANZA

We would also like to wish everyone a wonderful and very prosperous 2006. Have a great New Year’s Eve and be safe!

From all of us at LinkWorth

If you pay any attention to the SEO world and the forums, blogs and articles written about text link advertising, you will know what a hot topic this has become. We were able to pay a visit to the recent SES (Search Engine Strategies) Expo in Chicago and the topic had a few sessions that were focused around it. Matter of fact, one of the sessions was a Q & A with representatives from Google, Yahoo & MSN. While there were some great questions, the answers from the reps were good and not so good. What I mean by this is, some answers provided were helpful in response to the questions, however, other answers were just wasted breath and time. In other words, they didn’t want to give out too much information to protect their product, which is completely understandable. Of course, with answers, a breeding ground of helpful tips was created I wanted to pass along. 🙂

Of course I want search engine results to be relevant and helpful because I use their search tools as much as the next guy, however, as a business owner, you should have the ability to build effective websites with all the right aspects to gain the edge on your competition. Relying on a search engine to hopefully give you a good listing is just pure hogwash, if I can use that word :), so companies like ours will constantly innovate and keep up with changes in search engine ranking systems. Now we’re not here, by any means at all, to spam or create linking scheme’s to beat their product! So to those who may want to put words in my ‘blog’mouth, make sure you include this part as well. We will continue to help our advertisers build extremely effective link building campaigns, as well as optimizing their site to make it as search engine friendly as it can be. There are right and wrong ways to do this and we are very careful to do everything the right way. So with that being said, lets move on to this little tutorial on this post.

1. Building Your Text Ads

Tip #1:
Do not use the same anchor text on every link you acquire! For one, you are limiting yourself to that one keyword or key phrase. Natural search engine listings have a certain keyword that you should pay attention to; NATURAL. What you need to do is make your text linking campaign look as natural as possible. Use as many variations of the anchor text you want to push. Examples would be: (text link, text links, text link advertising, buy text links, sell text links, text ads, text ad link . . .). So create many different ads to use and put a limit to how many times a given text ad will be placed and make that number 10 or less.

Tip #2:
Use variations of the url placed with each text ad. So instead of pointing all of your text ads to your home page, mix things up and point them to internal pages of your site. Preferably, make each text ad about the page the user will be directed to. So with our anchor text examples in Tip #1, build a text ad with the anchor text of buy text links and instead of linking it directly to the home page, link it to an internal page that actually talks about buying text links. Then build a new ad with the term sell links and point it to a different internal page that talks about selling of text links. This will allow your entire site to become popular instead of just your homepage. This also is a very natural way of linking, which is important.

Tip #3:
Consider using some text ads with the WWW and some text ads without it. (www.linkworth.com and linkworth.com). Search engines actually give different ranking to both versions of this url. One way to really test this is if you have the Google toolbar, open your homepage with the WWW, notice your PageRank, then remove the WWW and refresh to notice your new PageRank. Feel free to click the links to our home page and notice the different rankings of our own.

Tip #4:
Create catchy descriptions for each text ad that a user interested in your service would want to see. Of course, not all partners accept descriptions, but it’s still a wise idea to make your description something you would read and want to hear. What this means is, do not fill your description up with keywords! Remember, the key to everything you do in search engine marketing (SEM) is to bring traffic to your site that is interested in what you have to offer. If our customer type was on a site and read our text ad, tell me which text ad you think would be more attractive to bring a potential paying client:

A: Buy Text Ads – LinkWorth offers link buying strategies to increase your visibility and shoot your traffic through the roof with targeted customers.
or
B: Buy Text Ads – buy ads, text links, text ads, text link, text ad, buy text links online, buy online links, get links, link popularity, increase link popularity.

I think you can see which description looks a little more appetizing to a potential paying customer. So take time to create extremely effective descriptions so not only will you build your linking reputation, but your CTR (click through ratio) will be much higher.

2. Selecting New Partners to Link From

Tip #1:
Relevancy is as important as ever these days, so when selecting partners to acquire a link from, stick with sites that are similar to your own in content and theme. As stated previously, your primary goal is to acquire more traffic, so you are much more likely to get new customers from a partner site that has something to do with what you are promoting or selling. It’s unlikely that a person on a car dealership site is looking to buy a text link ad, so it wouldn’t make much sense to place our link on hummer.com.

Tip #2:
Consider indirect relationships as well. There are MANY situations where a text link might fit on a site that isn’t necessarily the same content or theme. Products can compliment each other and might meet the users desire based on what they are looking for. For example, a website that sells GLOVES, isn’t necessarily relevant to cars, but some drivers enjoy to wear driving gloves, so in this case a text link ad for gloves would indirectly match well with hummer.com. So stay relevant but do not limit yourself to only your theme because there are many situations you could associate your product with on non relevant sites.

Tip #3:
Add your links slowly to partner sites. Remember the term we referenced earlier? NATURAL. Acquiring several hundred or several thousand links overnight or in a very short period is an obvious flag to search engines. Remember also, we’re not doing things to scheme or spam the search engines, we’re doing this to build your traffic and visibility on other similar sites. Linking is a very important part of ranking your website well, so it’s something that has to be done, just make sure you do it in a natural and non-spammy fashion. So consider adding like 5 to 10 to 15 links “throughout” an entire week. Not all at once, spread them out through the week. There is really no limit as long as you do things in a slow and natural methodic fashion. One thing which was mentioned was to look at your competition and see how many links they have, but that is such a ridiculous comment it makes me laugh. No one, not even Google, can honestly and truthfully say there is a limit to the number of links any given website can receive based on their competition. Site A could be a very useful and popular website with Site B and Site C being worthless and not worthy of mentioning by anyone. So be smart, but don’t limit yourself either.

3. Tricks & Secrets of the Above Mentioned

T&S #1:
Alternating Anchor Text Secret – If you want to buy an “ALL PAGES” text link on a large website, don’t use the same ad because it will be the same thing shown on every page. Again, back to your main goal, you want to optimize your ability to grab users to visit your site, so you want to appeal to anyone and everyone that might be on any given page of that website. How would you do this? We call it our Rotating Link Ads and it gives you the option of showing a different anchor text on every page. We are soon going to offer unique url’s for each anchor text as well, so it will give you the opportunity to show a unique anchor text and url, whether it is to your homepage or an internal page, for every page view. IMHO it’s the only way anyone should be buying all pages text links now. The important thing is the main domain url does not change, only the landing page of a given domain. Currently you list all of the keywords and/or key phrases you wish to use on the ad and it will rotate these on each page view. So it turns into a stat-namic (static + dynamic) link. The CTR of these on all pages links have been so much higher than using the same text ad on every page of a site.

T&S #2:
Creating Relevancy Secret – Some partner sites might be seesawing back and forth on being relevant or not relevant. It’s a great site and you want to link from it, however, you also don’t want to hurt yourself. Well why not make this site relevant? How would you do this? We call this our Billboard Link Ads and as the true pioneer to this product, we cannot begin to tell you the effectiveness this product can give any text linking campaign. Not only do you get your own entire page to talk about your product or service, but you get to plant content links throughout the content that you write. You write an entire page of content, then the partner places this page on their site and link to your page from their site. You can make the site a mirror image of their site or create your own look and feel. It’s a sort of in-between text ad that resides on the partner’s website. Most importantly, you give relevance to that website and create a given relationship between their site and your own. It’s one of our favorite products due to the CTR and the ability to say as much as you want about a given product or service on other websites.

These tips, tricks and secrets are many things we have practiced here for quite some time and some that have just recently been executed with much success. Nothing we suggest goes without our own testing and practicing, so know that these tips are not just guesses. Link building is the heart of any SEO company whether they will admit it or not, although optimization of a site is also very important. The optimization part of it we like to call their diversion of what really goes on. Of course I’m generalizing right now, because there are many very good SEO guys out there, as we have links to many of them on this blog, but there are also some big SEO firms that have a lot of smoke clouds circling their practices. I just hope this tips and tricks post can help a few of you out there. 😉

It’s been a little while since we have spoken of new features added to the control center. There have been a few added recently and it is time to point them out and give brief explanations to each.

REPURCHASE LINKS – Advertisers
This new feature gives advertisers the ease of repurchasing links they have previously purchased but have either not renewed, cancelled, declined or expired. Rather than having to go through the buy links section and find the partner listings and take the steps again, you can simply login to your account, go to >> TEXT ADS >> LINK HISTORY and select either TEXT LINKS, BILLBOARDS, PACKAGES or ROTATING ADS. It will show all of your past history and any links available for repurchase will have a checkbox located to the left of the listing. Select any and all partner listings you wish to repurchase, and then click the “REPURCHASE” button on the bottom of the page. It will direct you to a summary page of all listings you selected and the option to set the link location you want your link to appear on. Once these selections are set, click the REPURCHASE button once again and you will get the confirmation page showing prices. Confirm and they are repurchased. For those of you who might miss renewals and the text ads are not renewed and cancelled, you can now easily get your campaigns back up quickly with this new option. It will save advertisers quite a bit of time if in this situation.

LINK HISTORY – Partners
Why we did not have this before is a bit of a mystery. It has always been a feature for advertisers, but not for partners. Now partners can navigate to >>MANAGE LINKS >> HISTORY and select either TEXT LINKS, BILLBOARDS, PACKAGES or ROTATING ADS. This will provide a listing of all previous activity which has occurred in your account. If a link appears and disappears, you can now see the status of the link in your history. Sometimes advertisers will send a request and cancel before the partner ever gets to their account and it’s a bit of a mystery. Now you have full access to see the link and what the status is, i.e. . . . if it’s cancelled, cc failed and so on. Also, if you have a question on if a link should be published or not, you can visit your link history page and see what the status of any link is.

ADDITIONAL BUY OPTIONS – Advertisers
Based on several requests about adding more than one text link on one single partner site, we have implemented an options tab for advertisers when buying text links, packages, billboards and rotating ads. If the checkbox for Show Additional Options during checkout is selected (located next to the BUY LINKS and/or ADD PARTERS buttons), the advertiser will be taken to a new page that gives the option to add multiple text ads on one given partner website. You’ll have the ability to add multiple text ads on *ALL* partner listings selected, or go through individually and select one or multiple text ads no each partner listing selected. On the new page, each partner listing will be shown with all of your text link ads you have created. Each of your text ads will have a checkbox next to it and a link location drop down menu. Place a checkbox next to each ad you wish to place on the given partner website, select the appropriate link location/price and then move to the next listing until you have gone through all of them. When finished, click the CONTINUE button and it will direct you to the confirmation page. If all looks good, select the payment method and then the BUY LINKS button and you’re done. This is an option that may not appeal to everyone so we just made this step an option to select when buying. This allows those uninterested to skip this step. It definitely saves those wanting to add multiple ads on one partner site a TON of time.

SORTING OPTIONS – Advertisers & Partners
For those of you who might manage your clients linking campaigns and have hundreds of purchased links, we have been adding sorting options to all of the pages which might contain a lot of listings. This will help locate specific listings in your account easily and save a lot of time. Advertisers can access their APPROVED LINKS section and notice at the bottom of the page where we now show how many listings are on the page and also total up the link prices. This can help advertisers easily calculate prices paid for specific ads and or listings.

TAX FORMS ONLINE – Partners
Partners no longer have to fax or mail their tax forms before getting paid. Due to popular demand, we have discussed the option of receiving tax info online with our tax advisors and have been given the green light. We setup a simple wizard similar to other online tax forms you may have experienced with other companies that payout money and it’s easily entered inside your LinkWorth account. All information is received with secured encryption methods and is instant.

LINKWORTH MOVES TO NEW OFFICE! ! !
We have finally gotten moved into our new office. To be honest, we didn’t think it was ever going to happen. We constantly questioned whether we should have just found an existing location to get in quicker rather than having a brand new office built for us, but now that we’re moved in, we couldn’t be happier. This new office now allows us to increase our staff. More staff means more business for everyone. We are aggressively seeking new sales/account management personnel to catch up with our demand. We have set our goals very high for 2006 and expect to reach all goals set, if not surpass them. One of the main goals is to make all of our partners and advertisers happy to be part of our success. We appreciate everyone that makes LinkWorth what it is and want to show our appreciation with success for all. If you are located in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area and are looking for employment, give us a call.

Future services to be offered by LinkWorth

Pay Per Click Management
Since PPC can be a very effective method of instant targeted traffic, we plan to incorporate PPC services within your existing LinkWorth account. We will use our proprietary software to integrate your keywords into Yahoo and Google PPC programs.
Traffic Analyzer
This service will be free to all managed accounts and for a small fee to unmanaged accounts. This will allow webmasters to place a code snip on their pages and track all visitors with all stats detailed out in your LinkWorth account. We will relate it to your LinkWorth efforts and put it in very easy to understand terms.
Banner Advertising
Even though this is an old method of marketing, many people still prefer banner ads. It is a great way to build name recognition and visibility, along with traffic generation. This will also be incorporated into your existing LinkWorth account as an option.

As always, we will continue to improve our system to your needs. We listen to each and every suggestion and/or request. If it makes sense and others want it as well, it’s on our new tasks list. Without you, LinkWorth is nothing, so we will continue to tailor to your needs.

We also want to wish everyone a very safe and happy holiday season.

As most LinkWorth customers know, we are always trying to make LinkWorth a better and more user friendly atmosphere for all. Over time, we have grown to learn that what might seem trivial to us, might be confusing to others. After many discussions of how to make our control center interface easier, we have come up with a new and unique idea. We are calling it our “Facelift Contest“.

With any software program, one of the most important parts is the initial homepage. It can be constructed to give a quick insight to all major aspects of the program, much like having a bird’s eye view of an entire city. We, at LinkWorth, feel our initial login homepage could use a major facelift to better illustrate important features and/or sections of your account. It could provide more accurate statistical information about your account and be laid out in a much more user friendly manner. So instead of us putting our thoughts into the layout, we feel the best way to get something everyone could greatly benefit from was to allow our customers, who use their accounts on a daily basis, the power to do it.

This leads us to the actual contest. We want you to submit your best login homepage of how you think it should be laid out. It can be submitted in the following formats: jpg, gif, bmp, pdf, html or psd. While the design/artwork is a plus, we are looking mostly for the art of information provided on the homepage. What bits of information would you like to see on the login homepage? How would you like to see it shown? . . . and so on.

There are TWO (2) login homepages; Advertiser Home and Partner Home. There will be one winning submission for each homepage with either one or two actual winners. The contest will run until January 1, 2006. After the deadline has passed, we will select the top 5 submissions for each homepage. We will then construct demo pages of each and open the voting up to the LinkWorth customers. The voting process will run for a total of 30 days and at the end of the 30th day, we will crown a winner for the advertiser homepage and partner homepage.

Now for the part everyone is reading this for! ! ! The prize.

Grand Prize Advertiser Homepage – $500 credit to account (total of 1 prize)
Grand Prize Partner Homepage – $500 credit to account (total of 1 prize)
Runner Up Advertiser Homepage – $25 credit to account (total of 4 prizes)
Runner Up Partner Homepage – $25 credit to account (total of 4 prizes)

This is a view of the current advertiser homepage:

This is a view of the current partner homepage:

To submit your entry, login to your LinkWorth account and look for the submission directions on the homepage, located in the announcements/news section.

Tips and Hints to participants are:

1. Be creative and informative
2. Fast loading page (low image use)
3. Great use of statistical data
4. Detailed labeling
5. Extremely User Friendly
6. Simplified but detailed

Best of luck to all who participate! We are excited to see your idea’s.

Be sure to read our rules and regulations of this contest.

With the continued success and the future plans of LinkWorth, the need for additional staff and additional space was important in taking our next big steps. We are happy to annouce that LinkWorth will be moving into our brand new office just north of Dallas, in Lewisville, Texas at the end of the current month (October). For our local customers, please call ahead for directions if needed. All other customers nationally and internationally, the reason for this announcement is due to the changes it will have on all customers.

Shortly after we are moved in, the massive hiring frenzy will begin. The majority of our new employees will be sales staff that will actively seek new advertisers. We will also add additional personnel to assist in support, perform daily tasks, additional programming help and assistance in payouts. This will not only help business for all partners, but it will allow LinkWorth to grow. We have been limited with space and personnel due to our existing office, so our new location will definitely benefit everyone.

During the move there will not be any downtime to services and it should be seamless. Of course, anything can happen, but we have anticipated all options and are ready to move.

If someone was to ask you to define a text link, how would you visualize it? How would you explain it to someone that might not understand it? How do you think it might have changed from when the first text link was created up to a text link created today? These are great questions to dissect and understand the true roots of text links and the effectiveness of them.

One of the biggest conversations within the Seach Engine Optimization / Search Engine world is the concept of text link advertising and if it’s something looked down upon by the search giants. Let us take the biggest of all search portals, Google, and look at their view. I recently read a blog from an actual Google employee who gave his thoughts, which he claimed was also the Google view on the topic and he openly said the buying and selling of text links is against their policies. Of course, if you read their guidelines, nowhere does it say anything about the buying and selling of text links. Now let us backup just a bit and think about how Google is where it is today. What has made them the powerhouse they are today in the search world? The answer is very easy. . .the selling of text link ads. That product alone accounts for an overwhelming majority of their quarterly earnings.

Before we get too much further into this subject, lets get back to our questions above. I asked how you would visualize a text link and how you would explain it. Since I can’t ask all of you your answers and post them as I’m typing, it only makes sense to give my answers. So the way I visualize a text link is:

When I think of a text link, I think of a pathway; a direct step into another space. Sometimes I get very futuristic and think of the old TV show Star Trek. Remember the ole saying beam me up Scottie? A text link is very similar because it beams the user to another space, on another server, in a complete different geographic location.

Now when I think of how to describe it to someone that might not understand it, it would be:

A text link is a word, or group of words, which can be clicked and direct a web surfer to another location which will provide information related to that word or group of words. It is a computer reference to another bit of information a web surfer has the option to click and read.

The last question deals with the evolution of a text link. I ask that anyone illustrate the difference between today’s text links and the text links used when the internet was first born. There is no difference. Text links are the foundation of which the internet was built on. Without text links, there would be no internet. Without text links, there would be no internet users. They are what makes the internet “user friendly” and allows surfers the ease of navigating between one location and another to read information they choose to read without someone forcing them to do so. It is also what online advertising was built on. Show me one online advertising model that doesn’t involve a text link and I’ll show you a very ineffective online advertising model.

This brings us to the early discussion of how these search giants deem the buying and selling of text links “against their guidelines”. First of all, these text links are not their property to say how and when they are to be used. When the selling of text links is what has made them who they are today, how could they be so hypocritical in saying that another entity cannot do what they do? This blog that was read made comments about “filters being applied” to look for these sellers and not count their outgoing links. It was also mentioned about applying penalties to those selling. My response to this is, if they can live with themselves and drive their value and technology into the ground by hitting the wrong sites, then I welcome this new move. The selling of links being found automatically means their technology has to identify “intent”, which is an abstract identifier. Think of how many websites that are not selling text links will get hit with this crap because of a wrong guess.

What the search engine “gods” need to realize is, whatever product they distribute, the rest of the world will continually dissect and try to adapt. Right now, text links are the basic form of what search engine algorithms are calculated with. In my honest opinion, it’s the best calculation besides original content that any search algorithm can use to determine which site is worthy; at least the only “fair” way to do so. Sure there will be those who figure it out, but it leaves the true results out of human hands. If Google was to hire a department of several hundred thousand people to manually review and score a website, then you would fall into the hands of favoritism.

So the moral of this blog story is text links are here to stay. Search engines can say all they want to try and prevent the buying and selling of text links, but the bottom line is, it is ADVERTISING. The same advertising they sell themselves. If search engines decide to issue filters or penalties, not only will they drive their company into the ground by pissing off stockholders, but the buying and selling of text link ads will continue to grow and prosper. Online commerce is bigger than search engines, they just happen to have the bigger methods in which one could find what they’re looking for. Right now, somewhere out there, the next empire is being put together that will make the Google’s and Yahoo’s and MSN’s of the world obsolete.

Long live text link advertising!

We want to hold back the details of whom and what until it is final, but Partners and even Advertisers would greatly benefit from this companies products and clients. This company is in our market and we would compliment each other’s clients immensely with a partnership. They are a publicly traded company and seem as equally excited about what we offer as we are with their offerings.

So everyone keep your fingers and toes crossed and wish us all luck.

Any advertiser that manages their own text linking campaign knows that when it comes to wanting to change one text link on one partner site, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Well at least not until today! Advertisers now have the ability to change which text link ad or billboard is appearing on a partner website as a case by case basis, rather than changing the ad across all websites. One can also change the ad being shown in the middle of the month instead of having to wait until the end of the month.

Here is an example of how this change will help.

The Old Way: You have one text link ad created and published on fifty different partner websites. During the middle of the month, you decide that using different variations of your keyword would be a better plan of attack, so you need to change the text ad on half of the partner websites. Unfortunately, this must be done at the end of the month because you would have to create new text link ads, cancel the one’s that need to be changed, then wait until the first of next month to buy again. If they were re-purchased during the middle of the month, you would be charged again, so waiting for next month was the only alternative.

The New Way: You have one text ad on fifty websites and during the middle of the month the need to change your ad on half of the partner websites arise. Now you login and create the additional text link ads needed, then click the EDIT icon next to the partner site to change and then on the next page, there will be a drop down menu with all of your approved text link ads, in which you select the new ad to show on that partner site and submit to save.

This new feature allows the change of anchor text, description and also the url. The url can be a different page or sub-directory within your site, or even an entirely new website you are promoting. If the url is changed, partners do have the option to decline the new listing. If this occurs the partner will need to cancel the deal on their end.

Ad agencies, seo specialists and other advertiser accounts that require many hours of work each week will greatly benefit by this new feature. The amount of time it takes to reassess entire campaigns has been greatly reduced by an hour or two depending on the size.