What do I mean?

Advertisers pick the inline, or anchor, text they want to be the link through a search bar.  Inlinks combs through its database of content to find blog posts with that particular inline text, and serves up a listing of such posts, that are sorted according to Alexa score, PageRank, and Date of post.  Once the advertiser selects the blog post, some magic happens, and the link is rented.  The starting rate for many links are about $10/month.  

On the blogger’s side of the equation, the a static link is created on a given page to the advertiser’s designated landing page / URL with no “nofollow” attribute — pasing along the linkjuice accordingly.

The trick? Unlike other marketplaces, such as ReviewMe.com, you never get to see *who* those bloggers ar.  And also unlike Payperpost, no one is asking you to write about, or review any particular thing.  And obviously its not advertised *as* a paid link (under a helpful heading such as “advertisers”).

Translation: the hope is that Google will never find these paid links, as they are truly in the dark and under the table.  

Why? Only because Google frowns upon paid links, and has even encouraged people to report sites which are thought to have engaged in the practice.  

I won’t delve into the larger issue of whether its ethical or not, as I know arguments on both sides of the equation — that larger companies do it en masse, creating a difficult situation for smaller companies, but will never get penalized; that it pollutes the index with meaningless drivel; that Google is responsible for creating a link economy and so on and so on.

From a bloggers point of view, however, its just one more means to try and monetize their blog through a convenient marketplace that’s set up for you.  If you don’t care about such things as pagerank, or how Google thinks of your site, or perhaps those of your peers (if they care about such things) then its probably worth a go.  But then again, you’ve probably agreed to (or were sorely tempted to) rent out links private to people who approach you about adding blocks of text to some of your older and more popular posts, right? 

And lastly on the issue of hiding paid links from Google, I do vaguely remember Google being able to algorithmically piece together who is selling links from their “snitch” reports in a pretty easy way.  

As always, caveat emptor on all sides.