Direct Traffic Media link buying
Direct Traffic media are a leading SEO company, specialising in link development. There are pros and cons to their approach to link buying but generally they’re learning from their mistakes and improving their systems.
Their link development operations run under different trading names such as Direct link ads and Adbeans. Obviously, such a large SEO company wouldn’t want to be openly associated with buying links for the purpose of passing page rank and influencing a clients position in the search engines.
Style of paid links
For standard websites, DTM provide PHP code which you need to insert into your sites existing template which will create an adblock (similar in style to Google Adsense). The content of the adblock rotates as per their clients requirements so you have no control over what will appear or which sites you’ll link to. You can however control how many links you want to include.
What are the pros of this style for publishers/webmasters?
The pro of this approach is that it’s very easy for webmasters to integrate the adverts into their existing websites.
What are the pros of this style for clients/link buyers?
Since DTMs code is already installed on so many websites, you can get some nice juicy links coming in very quickly.
What are the cons of this style for clients/link buyers?
You have no control over the placement or style that the webmaster applies to the adverts. He may place them in the footer, sidebar, in a ‘paid links’ section or may attempt to make the links semi-invisible with CSS styling.
Aside from the fact that this style of adblock screams ‘paid links’, the biggest con is that if (or when, since this has happened before) the DTM ad server develops a fault, every website running their code suddenly displays the same error which makes it very easy for Google and competitors to out the network and clients.
Another con is that the same content is often used on multiple websites. So again, it’s a big footprint which lets competitors and Google track the network.