Selling Backlinks

After several requests from advertisers for backlinks on our newspaper sites, I started looking into options to monetize that opportunity. Since our banner ads are all served through ad tracking software, the clickthrough links are hidden and do not serve the purpose of a backlink. 


So the next best solution was to use our online article space for "advertorials". However, when I tested this option last April, the backlink was still not showing up in Google's index after about 6 weeks active on our site. And then I found this...


theoaklandpress.com/robots.txt

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: Slurp
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: Yahoo-Newscrawler
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 3

User-agent: YahooYSMcm
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt$
Disallow: /*.eml$
Crawl-delay: 10

User-agent: Teoma
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /shared-content/
Disallow: /articles/*/*/*/ara/*/*.txt
Disallow: /*.prt
Disallow: /*.eml
Crawl-Delay: 5

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Any thoughts??