Last week I got an email from a guy called Justin who, I suspect, works for an SEO type company. Initially he was after a link on my Ireland page and later came back with a list of more pages on Travoholic.com he wanted to advertise on.

I know I talk about direct link sales a lot but I thought it might be interesting to use this example to give an idea of what sorts of things I look at when considering whether or not to sell off a chunk of my site for a quick buck.

• Does the ad make my site look spammy? - Usually people only want to buy text links but in this case the guy was after a short paragraph with several links so making sure I could pull it off without it looking to spammy becomes important.
• Does the link point to a quality site? - For some reason some of the links point to NASA and I have a sneaking suspicion he doesn’t own that site so I’m not too sure what’s going on there. The other links are all pretty decent sites so I can’t complain too much.
• Am I getting a fair price? - He originally asked for a permanent link for $35 on one page and I instead offered only a year for that price which he agreed. But then he found a few more pages of interest and offered $175 for six ads. I refused to put links on two of the pages but agreed the others (here, here and here). He then sent me the anchor text and it turned out that he was after paragraphs with 5 links in each. I’m not too keen on these types of links but offered to do them all for $250. He countered with $200 which I accepted. If he would have been after links on my main page I would have bargained harder but for those pages the price is fine.
• Will it take a lot of effort to add? - Because of the archaic way my sites are set up, some things are a huge pain in the arse to add, like site wide links and certain other things. The reason I turned down ads on the other two pages is because they wouldn’t have fit well with the page setup. All up, adding these four ads took about 20 minutes. That’s an hourly wage I can appreciate!
• Is the ad deceptive? - I think he would have preferred just having the paragraph in amongst the content of my site but I requested a ‘Sponsored Link’ type image be put above the ad.
• Will the link have a negative effect on SEO? - I don’t know what I’ve done right with Travoholic.com but nothing seems to have an effect on it in the SERPs (I am knocking on wood as I type this… or on something that looks like wood). I think the site is trust by Google because it’s so old and adding links, so far, hasn’t had any effect. Believe me, I’ve added lots.

My thinking behind my recent bout of link whoring is that the site is pretty neglected and going nowhere at the moment anyways, so if someone wants to buy links then I might as well let them. Once I start to put a little bit of tender loving care back into it then I’m sure I’ll be a bit pickier with who I sell links to and in what format. I have some major plans for this site that will involve phasing out paid links. I won’t be doing this anytime soon though so for now I might as well take advantage of the real estate!

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