Text link purchasing companies

[wolfadeus]

A few months ago, a company approached me and offered to buy a textlink from my site. At first, I was sceptical, but the company turned out to be reasonably professional and the website I have to link to is decent and related in topic. Thus, I thought I could expand the collaboration - but they have a limit on one client per website only.

How do I identify "serious" companies like this one in my endeavour to get advertising partners for my websites? There are thousands of companies of this kind out there, but I don't know how to find "respectable" ones. Any advice is appreciated.

[cnvi]

Be carefull with these. I turn down 99% of these offers because they want me to put some code on my site so they can control the link that is displayed from remote.

If you can control the link, and if the link is relevant to your site and benefits the end user's experience, you should probably be safe. You might want to google the company's name to see if there are any complaints from others.

[wolfadeus]

Thanks, that is why I started the thread - I agree that 99 percent are indecent, so I wonder how to find the remaining percent for developing a mutually rewarding business relationship. Maybe we should start a list with conditions.

1.) HTML based textlinks only, no code under the control of the company
2.) Links to related content only
3.) Payment via paypal
4.) ...

[SEOLair]

I would include the quality of the site the business wants the link pointing to. Check basic quality factors PR, inbound links, yada yada. Links to high quality/relevant sites won't hurt your rankings at all (99% of the time). You can be as lenient or as strict with the criteria as you want to be.

-George

[BenFox]

If you're really serious about it then just backward engineer the process - Google the most competitive terms for your niche and analyse the backlink profiles of the companies on the top. You'll probably find someone who looks willing to pay.

[peterdaly]

1.) HTML based textlinks only, no code under the control of the company
2.) Links to related content only
3.) Payment via paypal

4.) Long term (1 year) informal purchase term/agreement

I think it's best for company purchasing the link not to be known until the details are otherwise agreed upon.

[edamer]

Does anybody know a reliable company (or Link Builder) that can provide a high quality Off Page Optimization service?

[marketingmagic]

If anyone knows of a really good alternative to textlinkads.com sticky me with the URL. Thanks!

[Whitey]

Beware of any company that controls code on your site.

Google tracks code to identify linking schemes and penalises and filters accordingly. It's more sophisticated than that , i'm sure , since there are legitimate uses of code externally controlled, but again beware.

At the very least it allows Google to query questionable linking practices.