$100 for one text link for one year deals...

$100 for one (1) text link, buried in the middle of some obscure page on my site, for one (1) year. What's the deal with these deals? Am I missing something? I am offered such deals at least 5 times/month.

Whenever I reject the offer, which is all the time, and offer a site-wide solution, they are not interested.

What am I missing?

Is it that most webmaster will not remember to take the link down, after a year, so therefore they are, on average, purchasing life-time text links for their $100?

Are they scams, and will never pay? I would just pull the link if they did not pay.

I do not understand it. :S

Are you being contacted by Linkstar by any chance?

Aside from whether they pay, the moment you starting selling text links, you're risking a Google penalty.

Linkstar was one of many. A Google penalty was something I had thought of after I posted. I wonder if such a Google penalty would be "lifted" after the fact? Webmasters could really make some mistakes putting up links like this, as they are paid for links, similar to Google Ads.

How exactly would Google penalize a website? Google would have to identify a site as a PageRank scamming site, and then penalize all those associated with it?

ZMTC was another, and I have used them and still are, on my xona.com (business websit)e. My PageRank has dropped significantly over the years with them, but I always thought it was my lack of effort into my website more than anything else. As another site (personal homepage website) has also dropped the same.

Perhaps my personal site dropped because it's link to my business site which has been penalized? But my personal homepage has been around longer, has greater PageRank, and was independent of my business website. It's "existance" in Google is quite separate from my business site.

They are going under the theory that site-wide links are bad and having one link included in the main content of your site is better, which many people believe is true. This is because SE's tend to think that site-wide footer links are more spammy and have a better chance of being advertisements than one's that are in your actual content...again, just a theory.

But, if I was looking to advertise on a related site, I would much rather have one link on one page of the site than a site-wide link in the footer of the site.

I would never base your success on Pagerank. Pagerank is calculated differently each update. I remember an update a couple years ago where many of my sites had PR's of 7...since then all of them have dropped to 3,4 or 5...but the positioning has only improved. You need to focus on your actual positioning (if your positioning hasn't dropped, just your PR, your doing great) and of course the analytics of visitors to your site.

I had someone contact me about doing a review of their URL shortening website on my blog not to long ago.
They wanted me to write the 500-2000 word article, plant two links using their text/url in the article somewhere, and pay a $20 flat fee for the article to stay there indefinately.

I could probably make myself feel better by doing the minimum article length they wanted and telling myself I made 20 bucks+ an hour writing an article, but I don't think I could even come up with 500 words about a URL shortening site, at least not words the site owner wants associated with their site. The sites themselves are devoid of content and are a thorn in every administrators side, the end.

even i would be wary of selling links. If google penalises due to this,then it would not be worth the effort. Also if the links are in the same niche then there should be no problem. A recipe site having a link to kitchen accessories would be ok i suppose!