Heh...I guess that shows Larry's personality is similar to Google's personality. They always keep you guessing.

SearchKing was selling pagerank, we sell contextual ads. Big difference. Google sells text ads. Yahoo sells text ads. If we base our entire business model around a patented technology owned by Google, then I think you could compare what we do to what SearchKing did.

I also whole heartly agree with you on relevancy. What's the point of placing a text ad on a site in which it's visitors are not interested in what the text link has to say?

Hi Aaron...I guess it's a matter of opinion if you think our advice is "less than stellar". Most would feel having an advertisement, or text link ad would be much more effective if it was not hiding under a SPONSORS or ADVERTISEMENT. How often would you click a link under these labels as compared to a link in other sections that do not appear as ads? The Google comment was more to make some people happy that were freaking out over an article written regarding this point. This was not our advice, it was an article written that got quite a few people all worked up and were ready to pull all of their hard work down due to it. So the point was to not give "stellar link advice", but to help click-thru's on the text link ads published. Or better said, we were "killing two birds with one email". We were making the people happy that were freaking out about the article and also thought it would really help click-thru's if labels were not typical.

Now I have read your articles before and you seem to be a well versed SEO expert, if you don't mind me saying that ;-), so I would think you keep up with everything that happens with Google. The selling of text links have been going strong for a couple of years now. Wouldn't you think Google, if they honestly had a problem with it, would have implemented a bit more filters to stop this sort of thing? This leads me to another interesting conversation I had.

One of our partners who has been with us for quite some time, had an interesting story for me early this year. He told me that he is an ex Yahoo employee and now gives speeches all over the world on optimization. He told me that usually it was for Google, or they had something to do with it. Anyhow, he was in Stockholm and said Larry from Google happened to be there. He said he spoke with Larry afterwards and brought up the concept of link selling and referenced brokers like LinkWorth and a couple of others. He said Larry's comment was "they do not interfere with the common goal of Google, so we see nothing wrong with it."

Mind you, I do not know this gentleman on a personal level, but when you hear a story, usually it is easy to tell a bullshitter from someone who is telling the truth. This guy sounded very sincere and he's also offered to send documentation of his job after I questioned his story.

The last thing I wanted to touch on was regarding this comment:

"Why not just work out contextual relevance and matching advertisers to publishers a bit better?"

In case you are not too familiar with how our system works, people often manage their own accounts and we cannot police people and tell them "NO". The accounts we manage we go for relevance. We give plenty of information about buying relevant links to your site. We offer a search option so advertisers can enter their keywords and locate sites relevant to them. I'm just not sure what else we could do. So due to this, we have to look at the system as a whole, not just what we do.

Anyhow, thanks for the "hard hitting" questions and comments! It's people like you that keep people on the straight and narrow. hehe. Honestly, you have some of the 'better' constructive criticism I've read and we definitely welcome it. Feel free to shoot me an email personally if you ever want to know more.

Jarrod,

Aaron mentioned something regarding shifting away from monthly link selling to page selling. Is this because monthly link selling is not effective or not in demand?

>He said Larry's comment was "they do not interfere with the common goal of Google, so we see nothing wrong with it."

All I got from Larry was a scowl.

Why again did Google delist all of the SearchKing pages?

I don't think buying or selling links is bad (as I do both) but if it is not contextually relevant the risk profile is drastically raised.

So do you see the business model quickly changing from selling links to selling whole pages?

Do you still see link buys to be fairly effective, or do you think the ROI is much greater on the dedicated page stuff? It seems like the dedicated page stuff would be harder and much more manually intensive to run.

Cheers for the comment
Aaron

Hi Aaron,

I dont see the change being quick but I definitly see dedicated pages being a major part of link builders arsonals in the near future. They are the most powerful technique that I know of, yet most people are stuck on pagerank as being the most important factor to look for when buying links. Those people will be slow to adopt these sort of innovations. Nevertheless, as more and more people begin to see the effectiveness of these techniques and begin spreading the word of their value, I foresee a point where Hosted Marketing/Presell/Content Hosted Pages will be the buzz word in the SEO Community.

Dedicated pages are a bit more work then standard link programs to manage and create but a lot of it can be automated and processed through a fairly efficient workflow. As for the webmasters they dont seem to mind the extra work as it equates to a lot of new revenue for them. This is great since the link market has somewhat leveled off over the past year.

Thanks, Hope everything is going well for you! If you are heading to SES let me know, I might be heading out for a day or two.... if I can find the time.

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the feedback. I will work on clearing up the sales copy to explain our randomization process, which is unlike anything out there. Our randomized content reads just as well as if every page was written by hand and cost much less.

$10 is per page per month for lower pagerank sites of which we have several hundred. Higher quality sites cost more. For example a page on a PR8 .edu site would cost significantly more. We also require a three month minimum which offsets some of the cost of the work to put these pages up. Although I see your point that the $10 may confuse some buyers, we have found that it significantly increases the click through rates of the ads. If over time I find that our conversion and close rates dont match the increased click through rates, I will definitly consider changing the ad wording.

Whats the point in randomizing the content? One of the points is to eliminate duplicate content filters from Google. If we used the same content on several sites, Google would devalue or deindex most of the pages as duplicate. We have found that when every page is different Google counts every link/page, not just the first few that it finds. Randomizing the content also makes it hard to find signatures from our network, which is something we strive very hard for.

The other benefits of randomizing content, link text, etc. are that we can create relevancy for several keywords rather then just one. A typical campaign of 20 of these pages could focus on several hundred keyword terms.

The success of this system is very apparent. We have tracked dozens of our major buyer's keywords and have been seeing incredible results within days or weeks of these pages going up.

We have not seen these sort of rapid results for years, not since the days when sitewides could skyrocket a site to the top.

I would be happy to answer any additional questions anyone may have.

Hi Aaron, InfoSearchMedia offers a service like this.. take a look.