I recieved an email today from http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/offering to pay "$100-$200 to link to a few of our client's quality, relevant sites" Has anyone heard of thse guys?

I'm looking at their site, it's pretty cheezy and well I'm wondering if linking with their client's sites will be detrimental. I would only want to link to sites that are relevant but I just got our sites out of the sandbox and starting to climb up in the rankings I don't want it to tank now.

Something tells me you're feeling leary about this for more than the reason you're stating (sandbox); only meaning, I get the impression you don't have a good warm-fuzzy about this...?

Actually, I don't think I'd go for it. It seems okay, but why risk your good PR and great traffic for a max of 2400 per year? Of course you can do this multiple times, but what good does it do your site? If they have a client who later turns bad, gets banned, or whatever - are they going to replace your PR, get you out of hot water with Google, replace your traffic?

Something tells me this will not go over well in the long run with Google and other engines, but I'm used to being wrong, so who knows?

They're brokering link deals for the sole purpose of raising a lesser sites' PR boosts ... just doesn't feel right. I realize they guarantee anonimity for both to/from client's, but still doesn't feel right.

Either way, go with your gut. Let me know if you go for it, I'd be interested to see if this pans out in the long run. (PM, I wouldn't advertise it...)

Good luck either way!
w®m

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W. R. Mineo

I actually did quite a bit of research on these guys over the weekend and I'm going to go with my gut and keep doing my linking the hard way. My PR on one site is pretty fixed and doing well I just need to get the keyword ranking to go up more. The other site is fluctuating but that is probably just the effect of closing down the affiliate program that was associated with the site. PR went down by 1 which sucks, but not totally unexpected when you lose about 1000 affiliate links within 2 weeks. They probably was the enormous drop and thought something was fishy.

I'm also concerned about this type of link brokaring because of Google's new patent and the stipulations about aging the links etc. I am seeing a definite trend of the links I put up in February just now starting to get recognized by Google. I'm going slow and steady as to not set off Google thinking I'm link buying or the like. 10-20 new links per site per month that are quality links seems to be the better way to go.