TNX.net text link service review

June 5, 2008 · Filed Under Gas Money, sponsor review · Comment 

TNX.net is another text link based advertising service that caters to both publishers who want to sell links on their sites as well as advertisers who wish to buy links. Rather than flat out cash transactions, they work with points which helps keep balance in their system. You can use those points to “buy” links on other sites or cash out those points through paypal payments. There are restrictions to help keep fraud and abuse limited but overall it’s a fair system.

For Publishers:
One of the main concerns about selling paid links on your sites, and especially using a well known “paid text link” sales service/broker, is that Google, for one, has made it very clear that they are very much against site owners selling links based on pagerank. Of course the reason for this is doing so affects the “true” amount of links, or “votes” a given site gets from other sites in the index. Basically, because of the way Google set up their ranking and the importance they put on incoming links and the visibility they made available, they have created tons of over-optimizing wannabe SEO freaks. Pretty much any site owner these days knows that they need to “build” links to get better search rankings and the easiest way to do that is to just go out and buy links. Google has helped create a system that helps to degrade their own search results and now they are struggling to stop it and in doing so are starting to aggressively penalize sites who obviously sell links based on PR (selling traffic links is ok still as long as you add “nofolow”).

So, is it worth risking getting your site delisted or losing PR to make some money off links? Well that is up to you. No one knows the depth of Googles crackdown yet and it’s hard to say how hard they will come down on specific sites for selling links. Some site owners might not rely much on search traffic or care about PR so for those it could be a great easy way to make more cash. If search indexing and PR is important to you, it might not be the best idea to sell PR links regardless how you go about it but if you do the safest way would be through private sales and not to go overboard with it. TNX does appear to understand this and look to be working on various ways to hide the fact that you are part of their network so there may be less risk than some of the other text links brokers but still some risk.

As far as how much you can make by selling links though TNX, it really just depends on what PR your site is and how well that PR is spread throughout the rest of your site. The more higher PR pages you have, and the more of those pages that are indexed, the more money you will make. You can use the calculator on the homepage of TNX.net to get an overall idea to what you may make if all your links sell out. You can sell up to 4 text links as well so the more you allow the more that number will go up.

One cool feature is you don’t have to sell links on every page of your site. You can pick and choose specific pages if you wanted to. You will make the most if you just add the code sitewide but some site owners might not want the links displayed on some sites and it’s easy to make sure that doesn’t happen.

For Advertisers:
Although there is conflicting “evidence” (read: opinions), from what I have heard Google doesn’t bother penalizing sites who obviously buy text links, even for PR. They seem to only look for link seller. If that is the case, you can go crazy buying all the links you want and TNX makes that pretty easy. And cheap.

Of course it’s not a great idea to go and instantaneously get tens of thousands of new links to your site overnight as that is pretty obvious to the search engines but if you were smart about it and set up a small number of links over time and kept adding to them then it could be an excellent way to really get some great links.

Unfortunately you are not able to pick and choose which sites you get links from so that could be an issue depending on the quality of sites in the network. I mean, this type of setup would be attractive to crappy spammers who would want to take advantage of it and if there are enough in the system then you could end up with some “bad neighbors” sites linking to you. TNX does have pretty strict terms though so it might not be something to really worry about. But not being able to pick the specific sites that link to you also takes away your power to make sure you are getting very relevant links. But in the end, it seems, regardless, links are links and they help.

Overall:
In my opinion, the advertising part of TNX seems to be the most usable, and least “risky” for site owners wishing to get some links and traffic built up. I personally would be a bit of a wimp trying to sneak past Google by selling links through a service, regardless of the integrated protection schemes that might come out, but I have no problem buying links this way. At least until it’s clear that Google will penalize for that as well.

The best way to decide if it is for you though is to just test it out yourself and see how it works for you. They have a promotion going right now where you can get a free 5000 credits on your account…all you have to do is sign up and head on over to a thread on DigitalPoint forums and ask. That should be enough for you to get at least one good campaign going and see if you want to continue or sell links yourself and earn more. You can find that thread here: TNX @ DP

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