did a search on the topic and found

most people will agree with your

blog.It will greatly help me in my SEO activities.

I plan on doing this very soon. You should check out replacemyself.com

– The first page might look cruel, but it’s great inside. Well worth the $4 trial!

– Preben

P.S. As long as you continiue to dish out quality content actually worth reading, and stick to your theme of “no-hype” marketing blog, I promise I will stick around =)

@Preben — Thank you very much. I will work hard to stay on your list of subscribed content. I also subscribe to very few feeds, so I totally get that.

@Ted — certainly nothing wrong with PPC is you can make it work….

Great article btw! I good comparison between article marketing and paid links.
And if you outsource articlewriting to the Phillipines or another country where the cost of living is cheaper, you can get a lot of articles quite cheap. Then you will also get traffic from the articles, as well as you know where you will get the links from.

And to reduce your cost/make money, you can bundle the articles and sell them with PLR rights =P
– Preben

@Kent — you need the script (sorry). The good news is that it is only $7.

Here is my affiliate link if you are interested in buying it that way. http://www.masonworld.com/recommends/7ds (no pressure at all).

Thanks,
Mark

This is one of the most emotionally neutral and objective looks at paid links I have seen. I gave up on the idea of “white hat” and “black hat” a long time ago. What you are really dealing with is managing risk. In most cases the risk to the receiving site is minimal.

You are right — it pays to be careful. Anything can happen, but Jon is a network security nut, and has been very careful to design a system that is unobtrusive and difficult to detect (low footprint).

That said, all you have to do is look at the Squidoo Slap to see a perfectly reasonable link juice scheme get blown up by Google. So, you take your chances almost no matter what you do. Google can and does slap people for no apparent reason (as well as for legitimate ones).

As always, the best defense is great content. I also think that having a variety of incoming links helps.

It sounds like your PR3 site was slapped to PR0 outside of a normal scheduled update. That is a little unusual, and it more than just “sandboxing.” Note that the sandbox is a mythical place that does not really exist. It really means “G rankings gone for unknown reason.”

For a normal “new domain” sandbox situation, I would say not to worry. When this happens to my sites they always come back. In such a case I would recommend more link building and more content (continued growth). That seems to do the trick for me.

I have little experience with purchased domains, so I am not sure what advice to offer there. It is said that it is important that your incoming links are not from “bad neighborhoods” — whatever that means. But, if your content is still indexed (I could not tell for sure from your comment) that is a good thing. If you get delisted, that means that they found you and are punishing you directly. Decreased ranking, OTOH, could just be algorithmic.

Did you take down the old content? If I were Google (and I am not), I would have logic that said if all the content has changed then reset the PR to zero. Why? Because the PR is based on the value of the pages. If they are gone, so should be the PR.

In any case, nothing for you to do now but sit and wait (and maybe do a little ongoing work on the site).

Sorry that happened to you.

Regards,
Mark

This sounds pretty cool, but I think I would be careful.
Case in point: I purchased an expired domain, a dot com that is a marketer’s dream. Three tiny little word keyword phrase that is mentioned all the time in online marketing. It came with G-juice of a GPR-3.

So I set up several posts, pimping affiliate products. and then I bought in to a deal from a guy in India to put 100 links on many “appropriate” websites, all for only $14. They did in fact do the links, but the sites linking in were crappy.

In about two weeks the site was ranked at 0/10 and even though the serps are still in first spot for the excellent keyword url, there are absolutely none of the post titles or body content indexed.

I’m in no panic with it, but feel stupid for trying what seemed like a good deal. It’s not nice to fool Mother G.

It is only one site out of over a hundred niche sites, but it is sandboxed for sure and just in a wait and see situation.

I would like your thoughts on this and appreciate your input greatly.