The friendly guys over at TextLinkBrokers are about to become partners of SEOmoz - they're going to be hosting our new site (slightly delayed due to Matt's Hawaiian getaway - sorry folks) and helping us run some of the tools a bit faster. I was chatting with Jarrod Hunt, who runs the business and he let me know that they just released their guide to link buying. It's a good resource, nothing outstanding, but very solid for the inexperienced link buyer. However... this piece at the bottom simply floored me (emphasis mine):

What Makes TextLinkBrokers Different from Other Link Sellers?

At Textlinkbrokers, we understand that it is important to keep our inventory confidential. This is essential in order to prevent the search engines from penalizing our inventory partners from passing link popularity to our clients. The search engines are actively searching for and penalizing sites that announce they are selling text links. Some of our competitors display their inventory to the public for all to see. While this helps them to increase sells it practically insures that most of their inventory has been penalized and will do nothing to help their clients increase their search engine rankings.

That's a pretty heavy allegation - that other link sellers are possibly penalizing their clients and almost certainly ensuring that the links don't pass search engine value by listing their inventory publicly where Google's spam team can check it at will. I was thinking that TLB was going a bit overboard until I went over to Patrick Gavin's recently sold Text-Link-Ads company (probably the best known link brokerage) and saw for myself:
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Text Link Ads' Autos Category Inventory Page
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First off, it's really cool that I can see the inventory that I'm about to buy. From a user perspective, particularly one who isn't familar with Google's war on paid links, this is a great user experience. But (and this a huge "But"), anyone can see that website, find the URL and check the "don't pass link value" box on the fancy Google console that Matt Cutts is always running around with at conferences.

I feel like I must be missing something. Is it really possible that Text Link Ads is doing such a great disservice to their customers? Why has no one called them out on this in the past? Is Google just looking the other way? Are other text link brokers showing their inventory?

My big question - Given that TLA's inventory is accessible to any search engineer, would you still be willing to buy ads from the public inventory section?

p.s. Reading over this, it sounds like I'm doing an ad for TLB and running an attack campaign against TLA. I just want to assure you that's not the case. We are partnering with TLB and Jarrod's note is how I found the article, but to be totally honest, when we've bought links for clients in the past (something we aren't currently doing), it was through TLA and not TLB, and the link value was pretty rockin' until Newsweek wrote about us and Matt Cutts shut down the TLA link value. I'd also consider TLA's owner, Patrick Gavin, a friend and a great guy - and recently, a very generous one, too. I'm just shocked that the inventory is out there.

Update: I just got off the phone with my friend Joe Morin, who noted that TLA is really not a link selling model for PageRank anymore. In his opinion, it's really competing with contextual models like Quigo or AdSense. This could be one explanation for why TLA isn't concerned with Google discovering and devaluing the ads.