A couple of months back I decided my SEO company should try selling text links via one of the text link brokers who list webmasters inventory in a searchable format allowing a potential purchaser of text links to find relevant sites. Basically saves us time dealing with site owners looking to add links to our sites (takes quite a lot of time!!).

The text link broker we tried was www.textlinkbrokers.com and this post is a review of their service from the perspective of a link seller. We are writing this review because it didn’t go well and feel we’ve wasted our time for nothing (I doubt we’ll get the money owed)!!

The sign up process was confusing because we have so many websites that we could sell text links from (their signup process more suited to a webmaster with one domain).

We settled upon starting with 3 websites and mentioned others we might list in the future, the person dealing with our emails either got confused or cherry picked the best sites as they accepted one of our most important sites (that was mentioned as a possible source of links in the future) and ignored others not so important (lower PR).

So we started with three domains, one with a PR6 home page (not our most important site though as this was a test of their text link service) and two PR5s.

For the PR6 site the payment structure was as follows-

Premium Homepage Payout
PR6 - $32.81/link/month

Subpages
PR6 - $19.25/link/month
PR5 - $15.75/link/month
PR4 - $12.25/link/month

Hosted Marketing Pages
$50.00 /HMP/month

Seemed a little low (it’s a very popular site, 10,000+ visitors a day), especially as we were only accepting 4 links for the home page. But it was a test of service so we went ahead, though didn’t go with Hosted Marketing Pages (hosting a page they create filled with links!) since I think they are a very bad idea if done poorly.

Within a few weeks we had the first link partner, for the PR6 home page link. We added the link quickly and while there tried to find our percentage of the revenue. With that link we get $32.81 each month and believed it was a 50/50 split (so www.textlinkbrokers.com also receive $32.81/link/month) but couldn’t recall how I’d come to that conclusion (in hindsight think it was from another text link broker site).

I think 50/50 is a fair split, while at the site I found what was clearly our PR6 site in their inventory and found the following prices-

PR6 Home $94.00
PR6 Sub $55.00
PR5 Sub $45.00
PR4 Sub $35.00

This is what a webmaster pays www.textlinkbrokers.com every month for a single text link from our site!

So our share isn’t even close to 50%

PR6 Home $94.00 : $32.81 - we get 34.90%
PR6 Sub $55.00 : $19.25 - we get 35%
PR5 Sub $45.00 : $15.75 - we get 35%
PR4 Sub $35.00 : $12.25 - we get 35%

We build a great site, we maintain the content, PR, the text links etc… and we only get 35%!!

That’s not right, so we tried to discuss the issue first asking by email what % do we get even though we knew the answer (seeing how honest they are).

No response to our email!

Another text link is requested, this time a PR5 sub page, we add the link quickly and resend the email.

No response to our email!

Another week or so passes and we resend the email threatening to remove the 2 text links within days if no response.

No response to our email!

Another week passes and another text link is requested, PR6 sub page.

Since no responses to our reasonable questions we are in the process of severing our relationship with www.textlinkbrokers.com. Not only do they take more than a fair share of the revenue for text links they ignore their partners emails!

We’ve been selling text links directly to our SEO clients for years so know how to deal with customer services and www.textlinkbrokers.com in comparison are a joke.

We’ve always kept a low profile when it comes to selling text links because Google frowns on text link selling/text link buying, but I think it’s time we made our services more widely available now we know how poor the customer services of the competition is: www.textlinkbrokers.com is currently number 2 in Google.com for the Text Links SERP.

So watch this space…..

Popularity: 60%