If you listen to the various search engine engineers for any period of time, you quickly discover search engines don’t much like links that have been bought or sold. In fact, sites that make practice of link selling have been warned by Matt Cutts that link-selling sites can lose trust with Google and the other popular search engines.
However, I wonder what the search industry’s opinion would be about Linkbucks, a service that pays you for your outbound links. The service works in the following method:
After your page loads your links are automatically and seamlessly converted into ones that make you money. This is because the site the link goes to will include a banner that you get paid for. This means you make money every time someone leaves your site!
Linkbucks offers two methods to get paid for visitors navigating away from your site. The first one was mentioned above and it employs banner ads, while the second uses interstitial pages (you know, the pages featuring an image ad and a link that says click here to continue to the destination page). Linkbucks indicates they pay $1 for 5000 banner impression and $1 for every 3500 interstitial impressions.
While the idea of getting paid for outbound links without having to sell them isn’t a bad one, as like Rand Fishkin indicates, the service seems to be a prime candidate for spam abuse. I’m curious as to how Linkbucks addresses this potential issue. Speculative pitfalls aside, would you consider using this service? If so, why? If not, what causes you to abstain? Also, if there are any Linkbucks members out there, let us know what you think of their service.
Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | murdok Blog
