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Should we drop the paid text links or not ?

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This is our first Guest Post by Mayank Gupta who blogs at ReviewSaurus – The Techie Dino.  

 

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Well, as Pearl discussed in the last post that Google is acting hard on those web sites which are selling text-link ads and the advertisers are interested only in the page-rank and not the traffic.  Whole blogosphere is angry with Google and companies like Text-link-ads and LinkWorth or PayPerPost must be sweating really hard at this point of time.

So, the question of the day is that whether one should drop the text link ads or not ?  

Now, there can be two ways of looking at this particular situation and different webmasters should react differently in this kind of situation :

1. Those who mainly depend on the search engine traffic : There are web sites who don’t have much readership or strong community around their website and search engine traffic is their main source of traffic.  DROP THOSE LINKS RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

2. Those who drive traffic through other sources : Well, these people should really not worry about the penalty and should enjoy the advertiser’s money as much as they can.

However, I’ll completely agree with Brian Clark of CopyBlogger and will suggest the set 1 of webmasters to actually start thinking again and work on their marketing strategy so as to build a community around the website.

I think everyone should go and stick to the basics and that is writing great content, because if your idea is to earn traffic then you’ll get traffic if you can write good content and if you are getting good traffic then there are ample amount of PPC campaigns which can help you earn good amount of money and then direct selling of the real ads is also possible and not the ones which look for Page-Rank Juice but not traffic.

So stop whining that Google is penalizing the page-rank and go ahead and start working on great content. Remember John Chow is still able to increase his earning even though he has been penalized by Google already!

 

 

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17 comments
ReviewSaurus

@ Anonymous : I’ve got to say that you are actually making sense. How the hell google bot will be able to find out anything about a link if we blending it with the text. Its the sidebars and blogrolls which make a link look like paid link.

But, still we really can’t say much until we get some proof of this kind of thing or may be something which someone may have experienced it. It will be hard to say, but I do think that what you are saying will be most likely correct.

pearl

hey guys.. thank you so much for commenting and keeping the discussion alive since I am in no position to contribute having no experience with paid links but I agree with the sentiment!

As much as I love Google, this king of thing will start to portray them more in the category of monopolizers, forcing people to follow their rules or else! and that is never going to sit well with the public in the long run!!

Anne

The problem is that very few people in the universe care about this issue other than bloggers and advertisers. Readers don’t care, your average business doesn’t care. Most businesses just want to get a high ranking in a Google search.

I’m new to blogging and from what I understand Google AdSense is very unlikely to produce as much income for me as text-linked advertising. My blogs will soon be three-months old and I’ll get to be more aggressive.

I have so much to learn — thanks for the help.

Colin

I don’t use any paid text links, I just blog…..period. Google likes to go out of it’s way to upset the applecart and change it’s algorithms at the drop of a feather.

So I’m quite content to carry on as I am, and having said that, it still has to be about good content which will bring visitors in, and interacting with comments and therefore building trust.

Who knows what Google will do next?

pearl

guess its not an issue for someone not using paid text links, I don’t even have a choice because of the PR issue but for the ones that do use them I thought google practice was sort of unfair! social interaction of course is a must to build trust and readership which in turn will bring advertisers regardless of what your Page Rank is! I think!

John

I haven’t dropped them. My PR went from 4 to 0 in a month. My blog is made to make money, so the paid links are just a bonus for me.

My Printed Circuit Boards

The issue with paid links is that they aren’t really functioning as a link. When the web was created a link was suppose to be used to “link” a user from one page to another. Most paid links these days aren’t being used in this fashion. If they were, Pagerank wouldn’t be an issue because the PR update did not change anyone’s actual link location.

PR links sold today are being used just for SEO, the people paying for them couldn’t care less if nobody ever clicked on them.