A small sidetrack from Tracking Week here - but I found this blog post and the comments that follow it too good not to share.

There is a great post and discussion going down over at the SEOmoz Blog that discusses purchased text link ads and there effect (if any) on your SEO rankings. Rand points out that the company Text Link Ads (TLA) openly displays the sites that they sell links on, and guesses that Google probably scans the inventory and discounts the links from all of TLA’s sites.

In the comments section there is a lot of information posted by Jarrod Hunt, who runs TLA’s main competitor Text Link Brokers (TLB). There are a lot of comments, but I would suggest reading them…there are some interesting nuggets in there.

Interestingly enough, it sounds like TLA may not be looking at themselves as a company that sells links for SEO, but instead they are a contextual marketing company - although their site might lead you to think differently. It would be nice if TLA would have told its advertisers about this change in methodology, even if it would have cost them some money.

Alright, go read the post here.