V7N Enters the Link Buying Business

Josh — you can get paid to be mentioned in the New York Times—in the Ads or the Classifieds . The jury is still out, to pun the phrase, on whether blogs are “legitimate” media. Sometimes bloggers are accorded the same First Amendment protections as other journalists.

Jeremy — Good point. Depends, though, on how many links a publisher thinks s/he can post per day (10 links — $200/day) versus how many s/he can fill his/her site with from the monthly guys.

I disagree with the trackback article. I never said, and I don’t think anyone else said, that Google is God, buying links is sinning and a 31+ ranking is Hell. (I already commented on 97th Floor’s blog, but I’m summarizing my comments here.)

Ethics isn’t about God. Ethics, from the American Heritage Dictionary, is defined at “The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession.”

No one said that you’re going to Hell if you buy or sell links. If the standards of the search engines state that buying and selling links is as wrong as, say, cloaking, then don’t do those things and call yourself “ethical” (or at least not white hat). You may not be sinning, but you’re not following the “rules or standards governing the conduct” of the industry.

Ethical or white hat SEO (which you might not equate, but I do) doesn’t try to game or play the search engines; it tries to provide even more relevant results (from its clients) within the guidelines set by the search engines. It’s not because Google is God and a rank of 31+ is Hell–it’s because as the search engine they do get to set the rules of what’s acceptable to them.

V7N claims they have “more publishers than the other guys” and “access to tens of thousands of proven link buyers.” No run of site links, though.

I noticed that (hence the “V7N claims”; I actually really liked the page paragraph on joining their network). I guess they think they’ll fill up pretty quick with members from their forums and their already established affiliate partners, etc.

I’m having to guess at a lot of this as I go along because, as you said, they don’t have a sign up form or much of anything else up yet. I actually have to go through my comments and my post to remove phrases like “I guess” and “I can only presume.”

The limited amount of information and capabilities on their site makes me even more skeptical of the service.

I’ll see if I can get an interview to clear things up.

Yes, it is, 97th Floor (Chris). John also told me that hopefully in the next few hours, publishers should be able to sign up.

On publisher guidelines, he said, “We request that bloggers blog about the topic of the link, not the website itself. For example, if we were promoting http://www.v7inc.com we would request that the blogger blog about the topic of web hosting, not V7 Inc.

“They would need to include the link within a sentence, with the anchor text assigned by the advertiser.”

Should be interesting to see how far Contextual Links goes!

Okay, Obvious Man, I’ll play along. I’ll even be obvious woman. Obviously, you’re kidding, but just in case, by “undetectable” V7N means “undetectable as paid and not completely organic links.”

V7N has now removed that claim from their site.