MediaWhiz today launched Inlinks. Its basically Text-Link-Ads 2.0.
On the Advertiser’s – sites looking to pickup links to their product can specify keywords and anchor text they are looking for and the Inlinks magic will go through all its publisher base finding matching and give you EDITORIAL CONTROL over which ones you would like to purchase.
On the blogger’s side when they get a new advertiser they are alerted and have EDITORIAL CONTROL if they want to place the link or not.
So the key here is going to be to not make Google look stupid. If your site is about electronics and your accepting ads for stuff not related to electronics clearly trying to manipulate Google search engine placements then your probably going to get dinged. But if you are only approving relevant websites that add to the user experience as a reference then from what I have seen and heard from Google Engineers you should be OK.
I don’t care what others are saying about this the bottom line is unless InLinks has some sort of fingerprint its going to be completely impossible for Google to detect.
Curious to hear your thoughts on this.
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May 1, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Well, we’ll have to see. Text Links Ads, InLinks etc… I think that if relevant its fine, but, we’ll have to see…
January 11, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I really love TLA… have been using them for one year.. I think it’s a good news that Inlinks from TLA is Google compliant..
December 3, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Makin good cash from this?
December 2, 2008 at 8:52 am
I think it would be tough to find out…Google will have to treat EVERY link as a paid link then…
November 26, 2008 at 6:57 am
I can only see where Google could detect the link if they created the account and went in through the INlinks system and found advertisers that way. That’s getting pretty aggressive, but that’s Google.
I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to accept paid inbound link notices too.
November 22, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Read quite a few blog post about this.. sounds like good thing!
November 22, 2008 at 7:46 pm
G will simply start buying a few ads posing as a customer and figure things out once they know of a few urls. There is always a footprint, some bigger than others.
November 27, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Exactly.
November 22, 2008 at 11:34 am
Whoever thinks Google won’t catch up with them are kidding themselves. They’re not stupid.
November 22, 2008 at 11:03 am
This is very interesting, I wonder how Google will react to this
November 22, 2008 at 10:43 am
I would like to use this services but which one is better? Inlink or Text Link ads?
November 21, 2008 at 10:52 am
Google will find a way to detect these just like the did to detect TLA in the past.
Because a lot of their algorithm is based off anchor text and the URL’s provided they certainly can’t sit by and let people exploit it selling/buying links.
I think we should have the right to sell what we want.. but what are we going to do without Google?
November 21, 2008 at 7:01 am
I think the more ethical issue would be how the readers feel if they clicked on the link expecting more information on the topic only to find out its a sales pitch.
November 20, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I am not a big fan of allowing inlinks on my blogs, but I think that I would be interested in buying them. I agree with you though…”Don’t make Google look stupid”. I think relevancy is and will become even more important in linking.
November 20, 2008 at 8:52 am
it catches a good point.
November 20, 2008 at 2:37 am
too expensive service for me………
November 19, 2008 at 10:48 pm
All that just hurt my brain, I will have to read it again tomorrow to digest it!
November 19, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Thanks, will have a look.
November 19, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Looks promising and good for everyone who wants incontent links
November 19, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Does anyone know what TLA/InLinks is doing to actually protect the community of users that adopt the product? As I see it I doubt anyone will latch on if Google has laid the curse of death on using it and can detect it. Any takers? Any TLA guys around to clarify?
November 19, 2008 at 7:25 pm
I’m punching myself in the face when I read this…
November 19, 2008 at 7:40 pm
can you put that on YouTube for all of us to see?
some good viral video bait there if you do it right. *wink*
November 19, 2008 at 5:09 pm
It won’t be hard to detect at all. Google doesn’t need a footprint, and webmaster who finds a paid link from a competitor just needs to click to report it in G’s Webmaster tools. As soon as 3 or 4 of those show up at Google both the publisher and the purchaser of the paid link will be blacklisted.
November 19, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Since Shoe’s post of the same name I have adopted the Screw Google Mentality. If search engine traffic brought me most of my visitors then yes, I would bend knee and kiss Google rear. But there are so many ways to get slapped, it is not worth worrying about what Google wants. If I am the least bit worried about PR then I shouldn’t even think about paid links. Wouldn’t be worth the risk.
Ultimately, top dawgs who rank first for highly competitive keywords, didn’t there by playing nice. Zipf’s Law should teach us to get to #1 first, and the rest will follow. Get to the top spot in your niche by the number of visitors, RSS subscribers, dollars generated, and PR will follow you. Chase after PR and mediocrity will follow.
November 19, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Yeah, Google is probably getting nervous, but there is not much they can do, unless they come up with more BS about making the web spam free of whatever.
The best bet for them is to buy the company out, which they would probably do if they’ll bypass all the legal stuff…
November 19, 2008 at 4:57 pm
They are not that good, they should improve thei system! I bought some links and when I checked the urls, I found many broken links …
November 19, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Google doesn’t like paid followed links from these brokers because they’re extremely easy to manipulate the bread and butter of Google search. I can see their point.
But paying my friends a cool $50 each to place a link on their site is the same thing. It’s just harder to get it done and takes away from the automation of link building (or some would just call that SEO). Is that ok?
I’m sure I’d never get an official reply on this but to me it’s the same.
What about rewarding editors $50 every time they link to an internal page of mine with great anchor text? Then I could review the link and give it the editorial review Google wants and thank a friend for helping me out.
It all seems silly to me and this type of link buying goes on anyways. Google just wants to take away the ease of automation away from it.
November 19, 2008 at 4:27 pm
that’s brilliant! I think Google is frantically laying tracks in front of a run away train.
November 19, 2008 at 4:18 pm
From my understanding, the way google detects paid links is not by an algorithm or by a footprint at all. They literally find one site in a network e.g. join a network..that is selling a link, they follow the link to the buyers page and then look for other links with the same anchor text that follow a similiar pattern. Once identified, they slap an “implicit nofollow” on all the outgoing links on the sellers site.
According to this person, he witnessed the guy (whose technology Google ended up buying and now works for google) uncovered virtually thousands of sites selling links in less than an hour. As he uncovers more, the job becomes easier. It’s a semi-manual process, but from my understanding it’s pretty effective.
November 19, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I think it would be tough to find out…Google will have to treat EVERY link as a paid link then…
November 19, 2008 at 4:05 pm
totally.. Its hard to detect a paid link thats is intext if its relevant.. and i don’t see Google penalizing it as long as it doesn’t make them look stupid as you were saying…
November 22, 2008 at 11:02 am
yea as long as it is relevant its hard to tell if its paid or not
November 19, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I am going to have to agree with Home Biss. This isn’t going to last forever. Google is like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, they evolve and find a way.
November 19, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Shoe,
Its easy to detect. You just login to TLA, search for a keyword in inLinks section. THen list of sentences appear on different blogs with higlighted keyword. If you just do then exact search on this sentence in Google you will find what site is selling links from TLA. Yes, I know its not an easy finger print but essentialy the same flawed system as paid blog posts like Sponosored Reviews etc..
November 23, 2008 at 5:26 am
Yep, that’s what I think, too. Google won’t just sit and watch, maybe they react pretty slow sometimes, but when they react, many people will regret thinking they can fool a multi billion dollar company and get away with it long term…I can already see all the “Google Slap” crying on the forums.
November 19, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I use the service on a technology blog that I have and I think it works great. It has made me money every month since they introduced it. Obviously if you get all weird with the keywords, your blog will just look bad to Google, so the editorial system they have works great!
Keep the spam sites out!
November 19, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I agree with Vanessa. If the links are “no followed” it will be cleared by the big G. However, by the copy on their site it makes it sound like it’s for raising your search rankings so I’m sure Cutts will be chiming in on this soon…
November 19, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Less than 25 minutes pass and your prediction comes to fruition…
November 19, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Heck – with all the coming changes in search to localized/personalized results, G wont be happy until they literally control all of the web.
If they are not getting a cut of the nickels being spent on links – they will find a way to discount them, based on the premise of passing PR. (Which, if eliminated or made invisible, would eliminate their hold)
If they are not in the loop (to be read as, getting a cut) on your affiliate project, they will find a way to discount it, and force you to use adwords to get the search traffic onsite.
Bow now… or… bend over… whatever you want to call it, Google is in FULL control of the internet for ANYONE who relies on search for traffic. Its a game of playing by their rules… or suffering consequences.
The thing they ignore is that most webmasters who helped make them popular, are the same people that make their adwords program popular, by either recommending or using it on their own sites.
If they continue to go from a algorithmically driven engine to a manual review, human edited engine, they will start making enemies.
All being said, I will definitely give inlinks a go. I use others now and they are very detectible!
Mark
November 19, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I think this is a great program because it does something very smart. It doesn’t mess with the content. As I understand it, it will only put a link in the content if there is a relevant keyword.
It’d be like if I wrote about Netflix and linked to the Netflix site. Now, if I didn’t make a link to the netflix site and Netflix wanted to pay me to put a link there, I think that is fair as long as I retain control over my links.
Of course, Google probably is going to freak out and try and lock this down, but I think of all the paid link programs out there, this one seems the most intelligent. I don’t know if I’ll end up using it, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
November 19, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Four20 – Yep, paid links with nofollow are absolutely fine because those are intended as advertising. Advertising is obviously buying links (for traffic). There’s a bit of confusing terminology here in that when people refer to “paid links” they aren’t generally talking about advertising, they’re talking about links purchased with the intent of influencing PageRank. And in that case, they attempt to make those links look “natural” to search engines and don’t use things like nofollow.
November 19, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Right I guess I was confused when I bought directory listings from Yahoo that were no follow. Because of all the referral traffic =P
The defense for that has always been because it was an “Editorial Decision” I dont see the difference especially with how Google is now diluting interior pages
November 19, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Vanessa, you’re right that our comments were pretty similar. I left a comment on TechCrunch (which their CMS dropped because it had links in it). I emailed the comment to Mike Arrington, and Mike added it in his main story: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/insidious-new-seo-ad-product-will-be-hard-for-google-to-detect/
November 19, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Somebody has to be thinking that if Google is resorting to quoting gov’t agencies then they must feel threatened
November 19, 2008 at 6:55 pm
seems like pagerank is getting a little long in the tooth. Is it even a priority for Google anymore?
December 1, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Thanks for the info. Aways looking to monetize in different ways.
November 19, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I read a post on Matt Cutts’ blog saying selling text links is OK with Google if you add the nofollow attribute to the link.
November 19, 2008 at 7:58 pm
If you add nofollow on link then you will not get link juice
November 22, 2008 at 11:33 am
Yeah, but there are plenty of people that only care about getting the money when it comes to link selling.
November 19, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Nothing is “completely impossible” for Google to detect. Certainly some things may be harder than others, but in any case, I don’t know that I’d describe any paid links program intended as to influence PageRank (rather than as advertising) to be “Google compliant”. The site says “There simply is not a more natural paid link on the market.” But a “natural paid link” is not something that really exists. “natural-looking” perhaps… But bottom line, a link may be natural or paid, but not both.
November 19, 2008 at 3:35 pm
If there was any way to detect these links Google wouldn’t have to waste their time with the FUD campaign. InLinks are the ultimate paid link.
Short of joining the network and teasing out participating sites, there is no way Google is going to detect these. Certainly not algorithmically.
December 19, 2008 at 11:20 am
@ddn good point: “If there was any way to detect these links Google wouldn’t have to waste their time with the FUD campaign. InLinks are the ultimate paid link.”
However I do think it will be pretty easy for Google to compare a before and after of a page in their cache and notice that there are new links appearing on old archived text.
November 23, 2008 at 8:56 pm
“Nothing is “completely impossible” for Google to detect.”
Seems they are having “big” problems trying to detect my autogen doorway pages with redirects.
No seriously, i got penalized more when i created a quality site and followed Google’s guidelines to the letter. If you spank a boy for being naughty when he’s not naughty, he will turn out naughty.
Just remember that.
November 19, 2008 at 2:43 pm
What about LinkXL? They push for relevancy and they put the links within the actual copy with relevant keywords. I also thought that text-link-ads already pushes for relevant placement (I haven’t used them for a while, so I’m really not sure).
Regardless, I’m totally with your theory of “if you are only approving relevant websites that add to the user experience as a reference then from what I have seen and heard from Google Engineers you should be OK”.
November 19, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I think it’s pretty damn slick, but I’m not sure how it is any less detectable than a paid post. Certainly the potential for more inventory, however.
November 19, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Well if there is no footprint than it’s not detectable, is there a footprint? Have to take a look at the code.
November 20, 2008 at 10:02 am
Footprints are not always on-page.
November 19, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Looks promising, wish I had thought of it! And it’s certainly WAY better than junk directories. I think the “fingerprint” will be a bunch of links being added to blog posts after they are originally published. Yes people do add links post publication, but it’s still an indicator.
November 19, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I like their model. I just have not done enough research to know if there will be enough blogs with Niche keywords to match the Advertisers’ “Relevant” Keywords.
Also, hope inlinks can measure which sites have been banned from Google, as those seem to be the ones that ping you regarding incoming links.
November 19, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Couldn’t Google just open an account and track which sites are advertising and remove link relevance for sites that are advertising and buying links?
November 19, 2008 at 5:51 pm
yep. unless you can prevent google employees from signing up as advertisers, there is a way to detect which sites are selling—not necessarily which links are which, but what sites are possibly engaging in the practice.
November 20, 2008 at 1:27 pm
QUESTION: shoe said that you have control what links would be put on your blog. As long as they are relevant what would be the problem with google about it?
November 19, 2008 at 2:37 pm
sounds promising… any official comment from google / cutts?
November 19, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Didnt they have a policy of no blogging about them when they sent the invites out?
November 19, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Personally, I don’t think InLinks can hide forever. Sooner or later, Google will find a way to detect paid/sold links placed by those who registered for InLinks. They’re pretty smart, that’s why Google is the number one Dot Com company in the World Wide Web!
November 19, 2008 at 4:07 pm
not really what I think.. I am seeing sites or I myself sell in-text links directly (no nofollow) and I think I never had any problem w/it…
November 19, 2008 at 2:33 pm
looks really nice, thanks for the tip
November 19, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Yeh it does look really nice. Sounds like a really cool program. Is there lots of money to be made from inlinks though?
November 19, 2008 at 9:49 pm
launched today !!!
I know this feature is there in TLA since many months ??
November 20, 2008 at 7:00 am
I believe that TLA is affiliated with inlinks because when I was trying to reset my password for TLA? i receive a mail witk …@inlinks.com!
November 21, 2008 at 10:16 am
Yes, it’s already in TLA and now they launch seperate website for this
November 20, 2008 at 8:03 am
I think, have to try and assess the real value of this service. -)
November 30, 2008 at 10:46 pm
I’ve been using in text ads since day one, and I have never had problems with Google.