Both of these models have falling out of favor with God. God has accused everyone involved with paid links of intentionally influencing 'their' SERPs and being Blackhats. Thus all participating sites have seen massive PR attacks, many sites loosing all of their PR (albeit not their traffic which was not the point in the first place). However, with no PR left to trade, paid link revenue no longer makes sense and evidently many sellers are looking elsewhere to make revenue while persistent link buyers are moving onto pastures new. So where does this ultimately leave TLA and PPP?

TLA have now changed their system to make it harder for God to see in their system who is selling links, however this is not fail-safe and most of the time, with a bit of common sense one can normally work out the url of the site (from the site descriptions). Maybe more interestingly the TLA format allows 2 types of links, site-wide links (which can certainly trigger flags) and homepage links. This is their standard offer and maybe their biggest weakness.

Homepage links offer the buyers the biggest bank for their buck but are also the easiest for algorithms to spot as paid links. Come on, who in the real world puts outbound links on the homepage of their commercial enterprises? These links while being the most valuable are also the easiest for robots to flag as suspected paid links, and as such scream unnatural link.

PPP on the other hand has done a lot more dancing recently, not only relaunching under a new trade-mark, with a complicated set of new offerings but have also developed their own new ranking system (which really couldn't have come at a better time) that they must have had in development for months prior to Gods wobble (displaying a certain degree of foresight).

PPP links are naturally placed within articles, leaving the only way for robots to detect them via giveaways such as the 'sponsored post' tag (which PPP were bullied into incorporating by the rest of the blogsphere). If they (PPP) relaxed the telltale giveaways their bloggers would undoubtedly be undetectable! Leaving the only question being 'who would they rather please, their advertisers and bloggers', or the blogsphere that has wished them Hell long ago and even made mock up PPP dolls that they stick pins into during their nightly ritual worship....

Given the rate at which PPP must be burning through their 3 million in VC cash, and I suspect they are still a long way from making it into the black, they will have to pull out of the magic hat some rather special tricks if they are to make it to a point where they can tread water on their own. But For some strange reason I wouldn't give up on them yet. Ted is a marketeer and I suspect there are many more tricks he will try and pull off before his day comes.

Given that the TLA model is blatantly used to manipulate the SERPs, and the power of God will not be questioned my gut feeling is that TLA will be the first to meet the wrath of God, and God only knows what thereafter... But the really interesting question is - what will fill the place of these 2 'blackhats' if they do wither? You can mark my words, there are many watching closely looking to pick up where they might leave off.