DETROIT---LinkAdage Auctions www.linkadage.com, a popular new site, allows webmasters to negotiate directly with each other and work out the details of text link advertisements in private.

'Simple text links represent the next great marketing channel on the Internet," said John Lessnau, CEO and founder of LinkAdage Auctions. 'Many businesses with Web sites are more than willing to devote a portion of their budget to this type of advertising."

The site fills a much-needed niche. Here's how it works: Webmasters can buy or sell links, or linkads, on sites with high search engine rankings, high traffic, high page popularity and top Alexa ratings. It gives webmasters control of their inbound links instead of paying a search engine optimization company to add the site to their network of sites.

The main search engines today place a lot of importance on who is linking to whom when it comes to where it places a site in its search engine results. Everything from the text in the link to the popularity and importance of the sites that link to each other play heavily in the search rankings.

The auction is a new, effective way of doing business. This site replaces what Lessnau calls 'link-begging." Because of the way search engines work, many webmasters devote a large portion of their time to direct link-begging or they hire companies that specialize in doing the begging for them. 'Either way, too much time and resources are spent on building worthless link pages that only the search engines care about," he said. Lessnau feels this time would be better spent building quality content that focuses on clients and potential customers, not search engines.

'There are far more important things to add to your site than a bunch of worthless links to reciprocal linking partners who ‘forget' to link back to you or just plain ignore your link-begging overtures," he said.

Buyers are interested in highly ranked sites with quality linking partners. Sellers want serious buyers. They are finding each other at LinkAdage Auctions. The response has been overwhelming and exciting, Lessnau said. More than 1,000 buyers and sellers registered within the first few months.

'I got this idea after extensively searching for a way to find quality links; there was nothing like this out there," he said. 'During my first years of building Web sites, I found I was spending the vast majority of my time link-begging, building out my link page that nobody ever looks at and spending only a small percentage of my time building quality content for the end user."

Lessnau then turned to the various ad networks only to see marginal return on investment. 'I found that the current ad-blocking software was slowly eroding the visibility of my ads. The ad-blocking software available today can block just about any ad service on the Web. In fact, I use a free ad-blocker program that blocks every type of Web advertisement except one: the straight link advertisement."

To be successful, links must be placed on the home page or content pages of popular, highly ranked Web sites because in many cases, link pages are now being discounted by the search engines. Many high-powered Web sites are very choosy about who can buy a link. The last thing they want to do is open a doorway to garbage Web sites, Lessnau said.

'I'm amazed at how many messages I get every day thanking me for this service, people are overjoyed that they can spend a few hours per month on my site and focus the rest of their time building their site for people," Lessnau said. 'But that's what it's all about, right? Building a Web of sites for people, not search engine robots."