inLinks Review – An Arrow to Google’s Achilles’ Heel?

Everyone knows that paid links expose a gaping hole in Google’s search algorithm. Many marketers have been able to take advantage of this weakness by buying up paid links and artificially increasing their rankings in the search engines. Google has since declared war on paid links and has been actively working to eliminate link brokers and severely devalue sites that sell links.

MediaWhiz, the company behind Text Link Ads, has launched another link product named . Unlike Text Link Ads, which places lists of paid links in sidebar widgets, inLinks automatically converts keywords held within content to links. Not only are these links harder to detect, but they also pass on more value because they are held in the actual content of the page. Location does matter.

There has been a ton of hoopla and controversy about this new product in the past week. Clearly, inLinks is against Google’s policy on buying and selling links and Google engineer Matt Cutts has gone as far as to say that use of the platform could be in violation of FTC guidelines (a scare tactic of course). Shoemoney rightfully responds by pointing out the hypocrisy of Google.

Nevertheless, there are differing views on how effective buying links through inLinks will be. The links are harder to detect because of their stealthy location and because publishers have editorial control over which sites they’d like to accept and and reject (the more relevant the better). However, there are still quite a few flaws with the system that may cause inLinks to fail as it grows bigger and bigger.

Ultimately, your decision on whether or not to use inLinks depends on your risk tolerance. How much do you have to gain vs. to lose? If you don’t currently have rankings (nothing to lose) or if you already have an authority site with a strong brand and diverse link profile (difficult to penalize), inLinks might be worth a try. A #1 ranking in Google for your targeted keywords could mean more than a 100% increase in traffic.

Below is a screen shot of how the inLinks system works. Basically, you search for a targeted keyword and it returns a list of available inventory that includes snippets, homepage and post PageRank, Alexa rank, post date, and price per month.

Tip: inLinks tries to keep their inventory a secret, but it’s actually pretty easy to see exactly where your link will be placed. Simply select all of the snippets and view your shopping cart. You should then see post titles associated with each item. From there, do a Google search for each of titles. You’ll often come across the publisher page which you can cross reference with the listed PageRank and Alexa rank.

inLinks definitely is not the safest route to take in advertising your site. However, it could potentially boost up your search rankings, at least in the short term. Do you have the stomach to try out ? Use coupon code 100free to get $100 of free links.

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