Selling links? Don’t advertise it openly!

As you might have noticed, I'm a huge fan of 103bees, as I truly think it's one of the nicest tools out there for bloggers and other people interested in what people were searching for when they reached your site. Today, however, I logged in to my account, and I saw that 103bees is selling links.

Now I'm not morally opposed to people selling links. I don't even feel they should nofollow them just because the search engines want them to. I think though, that you're very stupid if you're openly advertising that you're selling links. Why? Because it's relatively easy for a search engine spam prevention person (or whatever you might call such a person), to make sure your outbound links don't have ANY value anymore...

So, people buying links professionally for the purpose of better rankings in the search engines, will probably not be buying links from you now that you've openly advertised that you're selling links... In this case, 103bees is selling links through Text-Link-Ads, which is a fine service, but why not leave it at that? They're trying to hide who you are, making it impossible for search engines to spider the sites they sell links for, so you're probably good for now...

Of course, nobody will ever know if you're outbound link quality has been reduced, or completely removed, or they'd have to test that for your site specifically... It's just not very nice to your potential buyers, as the "value" you say your link has, is possibly greatly diminished by the fact that you're telling people to buy a link from you for that reason.