Get your mini ad spot

Joomla extension brings back worthless pixel image link ads

Many of you probably remember The Million Dollar Homepage that was created by a college student to fund his business school education. His goal was to sell one million pixel ads with a minimum size being 10×10 pixels. He hoped that the novelty of the site and the dream of passed page rank would help him sell links. Boy did he ever hit the sweet spot.

I assume he built up the site’s page rank first by pointing a bunch of high PR links at the site before he added the link grid and started selling his first ads. It was a novel idea and the ads sold very well which led to massive media attention boosting the site’s traffic and page rank more and creating an image link buying frenzy. The links sold out quickly making him a small fortune over 5 months. Genius idea.

You can read what web site owners were saying back in December 2005 at WebMasterWorld.

This was back in 2005 when everyone “knew” that buying links helped rankings more than any other known SEO technique. The reason the Million Dollar Homepage made it’s creator rich was that most people did not know a good link from a bad link, all they cared about was page rank. Hmmm… time have not really changed that much when I think about it.

As with any easy money making idea on the web, there were thousands of copy cat sites, but none had anywhere near the success because they did not get the same media attention and word quickly got out to SEO newbies that these image ads were worthless. After a year or so, the copycats started to give up and life went on as usual on the Internet.

So when I started stumbling on Joomla sites with the “Get your mini ad spot” pixel image link ads I was amazed that there still are people willing to buy into the small image ad scam. Many text link ad buyers are still page rank obsessed, so it only makes sense that those that buy links for page rank would buy into the mini image link ad dream and transfer their hard earn money to someone giving them a worthless link.

So here is my tip of the day to save you money: Don’t waste your money and put your site at risk by giving your hard earned money to this new breed of image ad hucksters.

If you need to buy links. Buy text links on relevant, high quality sites that do not exist to only sell links. Buy real links on real site that give you a real value for your advertising dollar.

–>Jazz

Tagg:

Category: Buying Links, Stupid People, Worthless Text Links