Hi all Well I noticed my site finally got off the ground with a PR1 last week which I was very excited about. I then decided to be a little more proactive about monetorizing my site and increasing traffic so decided to join textlink ads (I have adsense and Amazon but have made pennies on the former and nothing on the latter which surprises me). Anyway - I joined textlink ads this morning and then in the process of reading around found a whole host of stuff about Google penalising people with textlink ads??? I'm really confused - I can pretty much see the rest of the world is too. I'm now wondering what to do. I want to start earning a little from my site and happy to work hard to gain traffic but is google really telling me I can only use their program which doesn't seem to make me any money at all? Should I remove the text links before I've even started with it and go all out to get traffic to my site in the hope adsense performance increases? Or should I just go with textlinks and see what happens the next time Pagerank updates. I would consider getting rid of adsense altogether but I know I haven't had enough traffic to my site to really make a judgement. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone out there who is running teextlinks and not been affected and views in general.
I'm not sure you'll make much from link sales on a PR1 site anyway, but one comment...I would definitely remove the words 'test link ad' from your site! I know they currently link back to your own site, but the words 'link' and 'ad next to each other like that are like a red-rag to a bull for google. If you do sell links, be subtle! Not loads in the footer etc just a few, preferably in content. They'll earn you more anyway. But as for your question...assuming getting visitors is your goal, rather than making money from link sales, then adsense will work out better in the long term anyway.
Hi Rasputin Many thanks for your reply. Text Links have emailed me and said that the 'text link ad' link will disappear in 12 hours (which is good as I don't want it there either!). Ads will only appear if anyone buys. Gosh I feel like I've walked into a bit of a minefield. I think I really need to investigate all the options of making money from the site. The last four months have been about building content which is of course an ongoing thing but I feel like now is the time to start focusing on marketing and looking at other possibilities as well. I don't want the site overwhelmed with 'hey look at this' ads anyway as it will spoil the feel of the site - so I agree with subtlety.
I think there is a lot of hysteria currently about publishing text links from publishers like Text Link Ads. The actions Google have taken lately are primarily about sites that are openly selling PageRank. TLA got hit for that. So did numerous directories and some fairly large "search engine" sites and blogs. But you are a publisher, not a seller. Place a label above or below the ad space identifying the text link ads as "Advertisements". I haven't yet seen any penalties applied to mere publishers of TLA ads. I suppose it's possible that it's still to come but I doubt it, honestly. Google cannot afford to be seen as penalizing advertisers as that could and probably would be viewed as an anti-competitive practice. They are free to nullify the PR benefit of such links but they cannot nullify the advertising potential.
Nah Google is penalizing those who are going with selling text links and also taking advantage of Page ranks by selling their page with advertisments. As you have a page rank 1 site and if it attracts users then your whole links might be sold as well.
Hi Minstrel and Izeaus Thanks for that - it does make things a lot clearer. I think I shall leave it on the site and spend time building up traffic as I said before. I guess I shall see what the score is the next time there is a google update. Lily