DISQUS

I think the whole link buying penalty is being blown way out of proportion. To say "buy links and you'll get penalized" is like saying "cross the road and you'll get run over".

Sure, the possibility is there, if you go about buying links in a dumb way, or crossing the road in a dumb way, but for 99.9% of us the risk is not worth mentioning. Paid links are everywhere. If you do it in a smart fashion, risk of penalty isn't an issue.

To demonstrate my point:

http://www.internet-marketing-blog.com/2007/01/...

Take a look at that post and tell me which link is paid.

Can't tell? Then how do you suppose a search engine can tell which is paid? How in the name of everything sacred could a search engine tell if human review can't?

Shocked by the idea of an SEO saying do not buy links. 95% of ranking, and SEO, is links. He is in essence saying, do not do SEO.

Hi guys, and thanks for the mention.

The Contextual Links program was supposed to launch on the 15th, but we had some issues and it should be online later today. (Promise from my programmer.)

"but what’s the inventory like?"

Brian, the inventory right now is not so large, as we've only been running the program in beta for a short time in our private forums. But the inventory is good quality. And we will be aggressively growing that inventory with some major advertising.

As far as orders go, we have clients lined up to us the program. From running in beta, we have had over $20,000 in orders and we haven't even reached out to our database of link builders.

I think it will be a great program for both bloggers and for advertisers, but if anybody wants to point out how we can improve I'm hungry for feedback. :)

As far as the ethics of link buying is concerned.... Some people will always be opposed to any commercialization of the Internet. Needless to say, I'm not one of those.