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Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

13 points by einaregilsson ↗ HN
I just got an email from a company offering me a fixed annual fee to display an ad on one of the pages on my personal website. The email was professionally written, their website looked legit and I have Google Ads now which pay me almost nothing so I decided to ask what kind of ad, how much they'd pay and so on. They promptly replied, said they'd pay from 120-175$ annually and this would be a text-based ad, and they were only interested in one page on my site. There were two options for me:

1. Simple text based advert, which will "appear in the content area of an already existing page on your website".

2. Their team of content writers could write a new page to put on my site, which would fit my content.

To show me an example of their ads they sent me a link to another webpage, which they said had an ad for a company. I checked it out and it had a link to the company in the middle of an article, right in the text, with no mention that it was an ad or anything. It just said something like "We used Company X and their staff was so helpful".

So, my question is, how common is this practice? Now I feel like every time I see an offhand mention of something with a link, I'll think, wait a minute, did the author just get paid for that?

20 comments

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pg
Frequently. I forward them all to Matt Cutts.
chc
It's pretty common, but credible authors don't do it (at least not without making it reasonably obvious that they're getting paid). So you have to consider the source when you're reading something. But then again, blind recommendations were never worth much.
dmc
Very common, link purchasing is a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice.
answerly
>>a widely-used 'white hat' SEO practice.

Did you mean 'black hat'?

TMK
black hat would be hacking websites and adding those links to he hacked websites. :)
cheae
It doesn't matter what we call that but Google sees that as a black hat technique
petervandijck
No, paying for text links that are not labeled as ads is black hat alright.
dmc
No, black hat would be more comment backlink blasts and such, using tools like scrapebox.

I think it's called "white hat" more so than "black hat" because it's usually "safe" to do so. i.e., Google will not be able to automatically detect these links which are against their terms of service to penalize them.

nuttakorn
I don't think this is call white-hat SEO practice. White Hat is not directly purchase links but they do content + innovative way to get other people links to them. Link purchase is against the Google policy.
dmc
I've generally seen it been called white-hat. In my (limited) experience, black-hat is generally used to reference automatic link building, content spinning etc., while white-hat to reference link building through other means that Google will(or can) not automatically penalize.
rick888
I get offers at least once a month. I'm wondering if it's in some newbie SEO/marketing PDF that's been passed around the community.

My favorite is when they offer me $50 for a link on my blog for the lifetime of my site. That's right, not annually, for life. A couple of times I made a counter offer of $100/year and I got a pissed off response in the form of me trying to "rip them off".

Karunamon
$200 annually? Sounds like a ripoff to me. Depending on how popular you are, the deal they'd be getting on CPC is insane!
einaregilsson
The site is a simple tech blog which doesn't get much traffic at all. The particular page they wanted to use is about a card game I created, and ranks well for the phrase "idiot card game" but pretty much nothing else.

I would have taken 200$ for an actual ad on that page, but pretending that I like something personally for money is not something I want to do.

RealGeek
I get several emails like this everyday. All of them go straight to trash.

This is called link trading for SEO. Google is strictly against this practice.

damoncali
Perhaps, but they suck at doing anything about it.
matan_a
I've seen this often as well as a way to build Page Rank.

The higher the Page Rank your page, the more positive influence it has on the Page Rank of the destination site.. but it's more like "bleeding" because it eventually lowers yours.

It might be that your page has a good Page Rank and therefore is of interest to that company.

profitbaron
The email is off an SEO company. This is one of the many tactics which they use to boost their clients website rankings without making them look suspicious to the search engines.

Another method they use, is that they provide free content to web masters on the condition that the content contains a couple of links - some to the site they want to link to - and others to authority sites to make the content look authentic. They go as far as even paying the website owners to place the article on their website.

og1
I've gotten a few of these. When I did some research on the company it sounded like some of these links could be about gambling and herbal pills. That could have some implications for search engine ranking because you are now promoting a questionable site. Also, wasn't too keen about the annual agreement; term seemed too long. Ultimately, I decided not to do it.
ohashi
How common? Pretty common. I actually considered trying to make a business model of building low content/automated sites and monetizing through these guys. The amount they pay in general beats adsense by a factor of 10 (or 100) on a low traffic site. Their interest is the link, most sites with no maintenance or work are getting low/no traffic but may still have ranking weight. So it's an easy way to make them profitable.

Consider WP Blog + cheap hosting + domain. We're talking costs of ~$10 per site. You take average $150/year on an ad. You only need 1/15 sites to get approached to make this profitable. I'd say I get approached 5-10 times per year on 30-40 sites. The math is mildly attractive if I lived in a low cost country.

damoncali
It's extremely common and it pays pretty well, although it's not working as well as it used to. I blame google's increasing anti-webspam abilities for that (which is a good thing, I suppose).

There is a small industry catering to this market, including sites like http://linkworth.com, who has made a product out of what you're describing.