Ask HN: Have you been offered money for a disguised ad on your website?

I just got an email from a company offering me a fixed annual fee to display an ad on one of the pages on my personal website. The email was professionally written, their website looked legit and I have Google Ads now which pay me almost nothing so I decided to ask what kind of ad, how much they'd pay and so on. They promptly replied, said they'd pay from 120-175$ annually and this would be a text-based ad, and they were only interested in one page on my site. There were two options for me:

1. Simple text based advert, which will "appear in the content area of an already existing page on your website".

2. Their team of content writers could write a new page to put on my site, which would fit my content.

To show me an example of their ads they sent me a link to another webpage, which they said had an ad for a company. I checked it out and it had a link to the company in the middle of an article, right in the text, with no mention that it was an ad or anything. It just said something like "We used Company X and their staff was so helpful".

So, my question is, how common is this practice? Now I feel like every time I see an offhand mention of something with a link, I'll think, wait a minute, did the author just get paid for that?

It's pretty common, but credible authors don't do it (at least not without making it reasonably obvious that they're getting paid). So you have to consider the source when you're reading something. But then again, blind recommendations were never worth much.

I get offers at least once a month. I'm wondering if it's in some newbie SEO/marketing PDF that's been passed around the community.

My favorite is when they offer me $50 for a link on my blog for the lifetime of my site. That's right, not annually, for life. A couple of times I made a counter offer of $100/year and I got a pissed off response in the form of me trying to "rip them off".

I get several emails like this everyday. All of them go straight to trash.

This is called link trading for SEO. Google is strictly against this practice.

I've seen this often as well as a way to build Page Rank.

The higher the Page Rank your page, the more positive influence it has on the Page Rank of the destination site.. but it's more like "bleeding" because it eventually lowers yours.

It might be that your page has a good Page Rank and therefore is of interest to that company.