Shawn over at Digital Point recently launched a banner (and text ad) link exchange program which aims to place links across many different sites.

He runs the ads through an ad server and uses blog or forum plugins which allow the ads to be viewed as static text links by search engines.

I think this sort of network idea is a good idea if it allows people to select their categories. Right now it is in early testing stages, but I am sure Shawn would be willing to add more categories and other cool features as it grows.

The one thing I strugle with is that I am super conservative as an SEO and I would fear that eventually a big link exchange network could garner a penalty. I am going to go to Shawn's forums and ask him about it.

Currently the program is weighted by site size, popularity, and a variety of other factors. There are no profit takers in the program other than profit via improved rankings. Learn more about the new link exchange program.

I asked Shawn a few questions over at his forums.

Do you think search engines will ever be able to penalize such a network if it grows to a large size?

I don't see why it would warrant a penalty to be honest, unless the search engines are going to penalize sites for advertising. {shrug}

But either way, I would say it would be impossible to detect since it's not done with JavaScript, IFRAME or anything else. If you look at the source, the ad is embedded within the HTML source.

I actually had a problem being able to automatically validate that the ads were in place, because *I* couldn't even detect it. I did figure out a way to do it by having the system insert a unique/random HTML comment tag while the validation happens. But the tag is always different, and only turned on for the split second the validation routines happen. It's also a good way to make sure people aren't spoofing the ads to make it look like they are serving them without actually doing it.

I guess my question is "Is this idea truely scalable?" and "What other features do you intend to ad to improve relevancy when the network grows?"

I think it should be scalable, I mean I don't see why it wouldn't be.

Once the network grows will probably add things like the ability for site owners to classify the type of ads they have, then allow other users to optionally set their ads to only show certain types of ads.