The wrong way to link exchange

I had an email overnight from a customer asking me what I thought of an email he'd received advertising a website www.nettrafficsystems.com. They are a bit cagey about how exactly they work, but they claim to have a network of their own sites and for the fantastic price of only £245 per month, you can get 10,000 links from them. They even offer a free trial for 30 days.

I had to advise him that there wasn't enough information for me to be able to say the service was worth it. It might be great - I've never experienced them and couldn't find any write ups, but their own home page was page rank zero and the site has an Alexa ranking of over 2,000,000, which didn't bode well. They claim this is intentional - they don't want to be found by search engines. So why don't they block the site using the robots.txt file - and what harm would it be, given that they don't list customers or links sites?

My problems with this and similar schemes are many. First, they don't say how quickly you get those links. If it's all on day 1 then search engine are going to detect a massive spike in link building - all from a set of sites that they have previously witnessed this take place fro,

Second, for 'privacy' they don't tell you any of the sites they are using. Your links could be going anywhere. Are they PR4 sites or grey barred pages?

Next, there's no indication of how the links are portrayed on the pages. Are they mid paragraph, list or menu bar?

And lastly, the day you stop paying your links are all removed - there's no long term return for your investment. They claim to offer 'permanent links', but only for as long as you are a paid customer.

What about that trial? Well you only need to read the FAQs to see that at one point these guys say that it can take months for the effect of link building to show - "Ranking changes can happen daily but they are usually due to changes from as far back as 2-3 months." - that's when they are telling you why you should be a long term customer and I agree with this statement. Later on though, the claim is "You can expect to see some promising results already within the first month.". Personally, the only results I would expect to see that quickly would be getting new pages listed.

OK, I'm nit picking here. I suppose it's the surprise of the cost of the service has shocked me! But they are not alone - there are loads of other services like this out there - I've even thought of writing something along these lines, but addressing loads of the problems I mentioned - adding links incrementally etc.

To me, the best way is always proper link building. Get out there and exchange links with sites that are good, honest, hard-working sites. I'm not saying that the sites used by www.nettrafficsystems.com aren't just that - but there's no evidence either way. For the same price my customer could have one of us here spending a day per week link building for him. OK, maybe not 10,000 links on day one(!!), but a year down the line those links we have built would still be in place if he decided to cut back on his marketing budget.

If you have a large marketing budget and can afford to pay the £245 for 6 months and not cry if you don't see the huge improvements then it is probably worth a trial. But, if like my customer every penny is tight, then almost £1500 is a huge gamble.

Don't get sucked into these systems thinking they will always work. They might do - but the reason why I thought of writing one wasn't just to earn more cash, it was to increase my own sites' ratings. That way I'd have earned more affiliate incomes through them. If these systems are so good, why aren't the owners just using it on their own sites like I would have done?