I came across a few articles about how John Chow has been struck off Google. Other bloggers have written in their thoughts too.
It’s pretty clear that Google is beginning to act on sites that buy and sell ads for the clear purpose of increasing their PageRank. They’ve warned before so we shouldn’t be too surprised.
Does that mean text link ads are dead? No, not at all. After all, they are in the business of paid links. But the text link ads ought to be relevant to the site, and they MUST contain the rel=”nofollow” attribute. That is the only way Google will know you are not trying to inflate your PageRank.
So if you want to avoid John Chow’s fate, please consider asking your text link broker to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Or you can manage your own text links and add them yourself.
This is probably the beginning of more clampdowns. It will not surprise me if text link brokers are next in the firing line. And we should expect MSN and Yahoo to join Google too.
PS: I just googled for “text link ads”, and I cannot find the links broker Text Link Ads anywhere in the SERPs! Does anyone else have the same observation?
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About the author
I'm Alex Choo and I live in sunny Singapore. I'm also the developer of WP Text Ads, a WordPress plugin that lets bloggers sell ads directly to advertisers so that they pay 0% in commissions and earn 100% in profits.
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Comments 4
The real question is: What’s next for text-link-ads.com? What are their investors thinking right about now? Where do they go from here.
Will they take the nofollow route and will this put them in a straight competition with Google?
Posted 09 Jul 2007 at 10:23 am ¶This is certainly something that everyone in the text ads business has to think about, especially so for publishers.
A gentleman told me that the main reason why most advertisers buy text link ads is to increase their PR. I’ve always felt that winnng organic traffic should be the main motive, but it seems my opinion is among the minority.
That is why rel=”nofollow” will be an automatically enabled option in the next version of WP Text Ads.
I think TLA and other similar text ad brokers would be too brave to take on Google directly. But we need a more innovative self-service advertising platform.
Posted 09 Jul 2007 at 11:53 am ¶I agree with you. Organic traffic is the best way, if you are building an authority site. They have to find a way to eliminate the play for PR, then they will succeed. Innovation will be the key.
Posted 14 Jul 2007 at 11:27 am ¶Yup.
But the problem may be that the market for padi links exist for the sake of juicing up PR.
If all brokers use ‘nofollow’, I wonder what advertisers will do.
Posted 14 Jul 2007 at 5:52 pm ¶Post a Comment