My final take on paid links

by Sapphire (April 25, 2007)

I’ve taken stock of the companies I get paid links from - text links, scripted (like Adsense) links or affiliate links, and come to some decisions.

I’m easing back on dealing with companies that require you to have pagerank before they’ll let you publish paid links. Like and PayPerPost. Why? Because no one should be relying on pagerank - it’s completely controlled by Google, and Google has the right to screw with it any way they want. Long term: I’d rather deal with companies that have their own metrics in place for evaluating sites. LinkWorth, for example, factors in pagerank, DMOZ inclusion, Yahoo! Directory inclusion, outbound links, pages indexed and Alexa - and a metric of their own that they call "Link Rank":

At LinkWorth we don’t go too much on Pagerank. However, Linkrank is always a factor in choosing a site.

Linkrank is our "formula" on rating the popularity of the site with regard to the internet as a whole. If the partner site has a high linkrank, then that means there are TONS of avenues for visitors and most importantly, search spiders to find their site. The more possibilities for visitors and spiders to find their site means the more possibility these two extremely important entities will find your link and make it’s way to your site.

That’s the sort of company I need to be working with. Any single one of their metrics can be pretty unreliable, but looking at all of them should give some sort of consistency to their rankings. I wonder what Link Rank is, exactly? It sounds like it’s about inbounds, which could be a combination of results from Technorati, Digg… who knows? It’s not precisely Google’s pagerank system, and that’s what counts. What about everyone else I work with?

CJ and ShareASale provide their own relevant metrics (like EPC) for companies to decide if I’m worth taking on as an affiliate.

AdBrite is so easy, I don’t think they really screen publisher sites much at all. That’s fine by me. Ditto on AdEngage.

BlogAds - and the other really awesome ad companies that have been around a while (Adtegrity, Federated Media, etc.) - have minimum traffic requirements. I don’t know if they would reject a 0 PR site that met the traffic requirements, but some of these guys were around before pagerank so I’m betting they have their own trusted methods for deciding who to partner with.

Posted in Links
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