There are many different companies out there selling text links. It is a very profitable business for both the publishers and the advertisers. As advertising sources shrink from television and radio, more and more people are seeking new ways to promote their goods and services online. If you own a website, you can have people paying you to add one-way inbound links to their sites from your site. Also, you can pay others to put up your links on their sites. Google does have some ways to discern many of the major companies links that sell text-based links, but it doesnt stop people from buying them. In addition, Google also is thinking of selling its own text links now (in addition to their Adwords program), and their algorithms are set to ignore those links when establishing a sites reputation. So, its not the text-based link advertising concept they are unhappy about, its the fact that they tend to discredit the ranking by letting people pay for a good reputation.
If you want to use the text-based links to earn some money and get some traffic, in addition to a campaign for natural links, you can do this by using the nofollow attribute in the html coding. This tells search engines to ignore the link. Google is using the nofollow attribute to ignore paid links. Well go into this concept more in the next chapter. For now, if you want to buy text links, be aware that this is a tricky business that is very controversial. If your sole purpose is to increase PageRank, it will most likely fail in the end as search engine algorithms target them more and more. However, if you are trying to build traffic and make your site profitable, they can be used in an Internet marketing scheme as long as you are careful.
Here are a few places you buy links online:
Text-Link-Ads.com
This is one of the oldest companies selling static text link based ads. They are so well-known that Google really frowns on using them. However, many people have used them in their marketing campaigns. They sell their links on 30-day ad runs.
Linkworth.com
This site credits itself as the one of the largest and most innovative marketing portals. They do offer a wide variety of services besides just text link ads. They also offer paid blog reviews, rotating text ads, hosted content pages, directory and article submission, plus more.
Tnx.net
Their claim to fame is the lowest price links on the market and their recent entry into the market. They have a program that gives you 50% off if you are an SEO specialist or consultant.