Our mission at LinkXL.com is to sell relevant text link advertising in existing content. Several years in the business has shown me that these are the the links with by far the best shot at helping your site. Unfortunately, we made a decision early on to show the toolbar PR (TBPR) of each of the million+ pages in our inventory. We know, and many SEOs know that TBPR is pretty much meaningless, however we decided TBPR is something that advertisers would like to see so we included it in our keyword search results.

One problem is we index many, many inside pages of some huge websites. TBPR on inside pages of websites is not nearly as stable as homepage PR. If you track TBPR of deep inside pages of even the best websites, you will find the TBPR is in constant flux. One day a deep inside page will be a PR1, then a week later a PR2, then two days later a PR0, then back to a PR2. So rather than focus on TBPR, one would think buyers would focus on page relevancy. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

It seems LinkXL has three type of Advertisers:

• Smart Buyers that focus on long term links on relevant pages regardless of PR;
• PR Chasers that are constantly changing links to make sure they have links on the highest PR pages possible; and
• PR Cry Babies that not only are confused about the value of TBPR, they complain and cry about any downward change in PR and ultimately cancel links that are helping them.

At LinkXL, Smart Buyers are reaping excellent SERP rewards at a very low cost, while the PR Chasers and PR Cry Babies are spending more time and money to be on the highest TBPR possible with little concern about page relevancy or link continuity. It is ironic that the PR Chasers and PR Cry Babies spend the most money on text link advertising yet have the worst end results in their SERPs.

We have thought about removing the PR metric at LinkXL, but many Publishers still want to charge based on the PR of their pages which only perpetuates the TBPR myth. At LinkXL we put the pricing in the hands of the publishers; we feel that they deserve to charge what they want for advertising on their website.

However, as each month goes by, I definitely see the wisdom of brokers that set the price for the publishers. To make sure that publishers maximize revenue, and to get advertisers to think more about relevancy rather the TBPR this may be a future step we need to take.

My dream is Google will stop showing TBPR so advertisers will focus more on link relevancy rather than TBPR. Obviously, this is not something Google will do because TBPR creates confusion in the marketplace by making the Cry Babies kick and scream with every TBPR update, while the PR chasers cancel great long term links and use the money to start over with a brand new higher PR links.

Smart Link Buyers Use LinkXL to find natural, relevant text links

Popularity: 15% [?]