Opinions About G**gle Reaction to Advertising Sales

I've been doing some research into G**gle's policies about sites which sell advertising along with running AdSense. They state that they allow us to sell text ads provided they do not appear to look like Google AdSense ads to any reasonable person. No problem. The text ads on my site do not look anything at all like Google AdSense ads, and, when I sell one, I remove the AdSense stuff from that column completely. I've been doing this for a couple of years and have had no emails from them.

Then there is the larger question of selling advertising as a whole. We see advertising on all the big sites, including sitewide links on major newspapers like the FresnoBee and the Salt Lake Tribune --- just to mention a couple. HowStuffWorks sells text links. Then, of course, there are banner and button ads everywhere.

Yet on many SEO forums the whole subject of selling advertising seems considered something taboo --- selling PR as it's often labeled. Yet few people buy links or image ads on low PR sites. It's the first thing a potential customer looks at, the first thing they want to know. You can't escape it, just as you cannot escape people wanting to know how many pages you serve a month.

So most smaller sites which do sell advertising do it in what I would almost call a furtive way, running auctions or posting offers on a few forums which allow it, such as this one.

I'm not convinced G**gle even has any penalties for selling advertising. Why should there be one set of rules for MSN or Expedia.com and another set of rules for the little guy? Could it be that the "penalty" is just loss of PR due to not taking into account the increased number of outbounds --- just a natural consequence of the PR algorhythm? Or if a site exists only to produce links for sale I could understand G banning the site. Or does G really have such a penalty against even quality content sites which would just like to increase revenues selling legitimate advertising? It's a total mystery to me.

I've written a script which even allows a potential client to build his/her text link, text ad, or image ad on the fly and see how it will appear on the page before making a purchase, complete with a purchase button. The trouble is I don't know if, in fact, G will penalize me. Maybe there is some truth to all of this, or perhaps it's just not something G even cares about. I've had my days I like G**gle and days I don't, just like all of us. But I have really never thought of them as unfair or doing anything to prevent anyone from making an honest dollar by providing a legitimate service.

I'd just be interested in your opinions on the subject, because I would really like to just come right up front about this.

-- Ron

 

Google doesn't have a penalty for selling advertising, but there is a grey area about selling text links for the purpose of increasing PR. You'll see a lot of text link brokers who do not advertise the URL of the site because of this. I think you are apt to have less problems if you market from the site traffic angle the link might produce rather than saying just saying you have a PR6 site which will increase your PageRank. Of course not posting the URL would probably reduce the chance of any problems. Ultimately the final decision rests with google. I think the site, and how the links are displayed on the page is another factor- it's one of those things that can be hard to define, but they know it when they see it.