Remove affiliate ads during link building?

Hello all,

Just found out about this forum not long ago, and have learnt quite a bit from it already. What a great community!

Now a question: I built a credit-related website a few months ago, and just like many new comers, I was eager to load it with adsense and affiliate ads (CJ and Linkshare). Although it did bring me a couple hundred dollars (I was pretty excited actually), the traffic was poor. I think the reason is that I only have a few links so far, so I've decided to focus on link building for now. I've spent many hours lately learning how to do it right from the begining, but one thing that still puzzles me is whether I should remove the ads during this process. As a precaution I've already taken out all Google ads and most aff. ads to make the site cleaner, but is this the right approach? I'm really looking long term and don't rely on this income at all, but I always wonder if it is true that less ads make it more likely for other sites to link to it. Any opinions?

Thanks

 

Well, maybe it is a good solution to remove the ads while growing the site, but, hey, when can you say that the site is grown and I don't want anymore visitors on my site, I am ready to put ads.

But indeed, in order to build visitors trust it would be better to not have ads on it, even if I don't do it all the time...

 

I see no problem with ads so long as they are used in context, complement your website and don't aim to mislead your visitors in any way. If your site is worthwhile, with useful unique content, people won't have a problem linking to you if you have some ads. There are loads of big, successful websites with ads on them.

 

You have to find a good balance.
What good is it to have the traffic.. then drive it rigght back off by overloading the ads?
Have a good balance, make sure they're in context, and you wont have a problem with it.

 

All good points. Even before I removed the ads I had no more than 3 on each page, all heavy on contents. Now I've removed all banners, all adsense stuff, and just left a few text ads which blend into contents. I'm hoping to get 20-30 links in the next 3 months or so, and then gradually put a few more banners back in.

Adsense wasn't making me much money anyway due to low traffic, but if I put it back after, say 6 months, does Google have a problem with that? Do they cancel accounts for long inactivity period? Thanks.

 

As long as you're not overdoing it, I don't think you need to remove the ads.
They've become an accepted part of most websites and as long as they aren't overwhelming the content on the page I think most people will still link to the site.

 

To be quite honest actually I believe removing the ads over a longer period won't be the smartest thing to do, but to answer your question, no, google wont ban your accout for that.

 

No,

Just because you have ads on your site doesn't mean that others will not link to you. The main reasons why others will link to you will be because of your designed and the content that is on your site. If you have to many ads that are rather overdone, then yes that will prevent people from wanting to link to you.

But truthfully you have to think that if people don't want to link to you because you have to many ads, then your visitors that will come to your site natually anyway will also think the same and will leave your site without returning probably.

Aslong as you don't overdue your ads and they look apart of your content you should be fine.

 

Good point. This is probably a good test of whether or not the ads on your site are obtrusive to the point of turning off your visitors. If you think that people won't link to your site because the ads are too obtrusive, than they probably won't visit your site either.

 

Test, test and test again!

Try some ads, try no ads and see what happens - monitor your traffic carefully and where it is coming from.