Can you possibly get penalized for Making Money selling Text Links?

Ever since the rising of the big G this had been a debate within the SEO community. And though I hate to accept the fact, I should tell you that despite the outcome of this article, the debate is going to continue. But, let’s keep the debate aside.

Can you make GOOD money from selling links?

Oh yes, you can! But it depends on which program you enroll in - meaning which Text Link marketplace. There are so many like Text Links Ads and TNX. But my choice of the marketplace is TNX. I earn more than $70 USD per month by keeping a small PHP code block in my sidebar. And with TNX, I also earn money from selling text links that have not yet received a PR even. And that brings us to our next question…

Will you get penalized by Search Engines for doing this?

Yes and no.

Let’s take Google for an example. It was believed that Google penalized web sites (revoked their PR) for selling Text Links. That’s true. But most of the people who tell you this, won’t tell you that this happened after a manual revision of those web sites selling text links. Google had officially stated that the PR fluctuations of certain web sites happened after a manual review.

So, in my opinion, relatively small blogs do not need to worry about going through a PR dilemma since it’s practically impossible for Google to manually review 100 million blogs - period.

And the second thing, let’s just imagine that Problogger.net paid 1000 bloggers to have it’s link displayed in 1000 different blogs for the anchor text “Make Money Online”. Will those 1000 bloggers get penalized? Errrr.. hardly. See, there are so many Problogger fans that there might be 100’s of bloggers giving Problogger.net a link with the anchor text “Make Money Online”. And the thruth is that, there’s nothing distinguishable between those 1000 paid-off bloggers and the hardcore Problogger fans in the way they link to Problogger.

So, that means either all those people get penalized for linking to Problogger, or none of them get penalized without being manually reviewed (which is practically impossible for Google). Which means, Google’s technology of checking web sites for natural link profiles is somewhat flawed.

Do you have any evidence for the things that you put forth?

This blog? I sell text links with a blog Homepage PR of 3 and a domain PR of 4. And I use TNX which virtually leaves no Google.

And if you think having large Blogrolls with lots of outgoing links can harm your G-Rep, just check this blog out.

And if you search around, there are countless others.

But, what about all those people who claim to have been penalized?

Remember, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to get penalized. I’m saying it’s near impossible. I’m sure the facts would say so too. But in the distant future, certain points I’m putting forth might not be so valid. If you think you’re a relatively small blogger being penalized for selling text links, just remember that selling text links is not the only thing that you can get penalized for.

If you have knowingly or unknowingly been engaging in black hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, image alt tag manipulating, dofollow PHP redirects for affiliate links and so on, then you might have been penalized for those techniques rather than making a buck from selling a text link.