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Should we drop the paid text links or not ?

pearl 17

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
pearl

that is sound advice Mayank .. are you using text-link ads on your blog? Do you mind sharing what you have decided to do? As I said, I don’t have that problem yet but I do share the concern with a lot of the bloggers though

anonymous

Mayank, you are right, it’s a big propaganda issue right now and they’ve hit a few high profile blogs to make ripples in the blogosphere.

I am with a particular link broker, one of which you mentioned here, but I will remain anonymous for now. Hope you don’t mind. I want to tell bloggers what to do to protect themselves and still reap the rewards of making money blogging. It’s absolutely absurd for google to tell bloggers what they can and cannot do by penalizing them for anything. If it’s spammy, fine, but most of this is just a bunch of BS.

So here’s what you do… remove all affiliate links from your site. Or use some link redirector so it hides these places names on your site. If you use a TLA or LinkWorth or PPP, you can talk about them in your blog posts because that’s not what the spiders can decipher, they look at sidebars, headers and footers. Work links into your content, it’s the least detectable way. I know LinkWorth has a product called LinkInTxt where it crawls your pages and offers up keywords for sale. Then you basically hyperlink that keyword to the advertiser. It’s all relevant and good for your readers at the same time. Most importantly, Google can’t say shit about it. I think TLA has something similar for wordpress, but I don’t think it’s as good as LinkWorth’s.

PayPerPost – just remove the buy direct on the page or you hide the url. That’s the most important thing here, if you use an image from one of these places, save the image to your hard drive, rename it to what you want to call it that has nothing to do with the company, then upload it and use it. Or even better, make your own so if a human reviews your site from google, they can’t tell.

Just be smart and not so obvious and you’ll be fine. Google is going to take this too far and they’ll turn the people that built their empire against them and they’ll crumble like the Soviet Union.

Steven Snell

I would probably take them down if I were using them. At least until I developed a plan that would prepare for any potential harm that it caused.

pearl

thank you so much for your insight anonymous! I am going to try LinkWorth soon since I am not getting anything from TextLinks – no PR… I know .. it sucks! guess I should take off that ppp badge for the time being!

pearl

@Steven… good idea!

@Susan – I’ve gotten so used to Google, I hadn’t been using Yahoo for sometime, may be occasionally did, but recently ive noticed quite a bit of improvement in searches results!

@Ken…. yep, concentrating on content will take care of these problems ;)

kaylee

I DUNNO THAT MAY BE TOO EXTREME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mioved to wordpress like it aliot :P

Susan Suarez

My initial feeling is that Google is taking it too far, but who knows…time will tell. Right now I’m actually leaning towards Yahoo… :)

Ken Xu

I agree that creating content is far more important then keep whining on PR and penalizing problem. It’s wasting energy where we could use the energy to something far more valuable.

kaylee

GETTING A HEART TRANSPLANT SATURDAY :P

Deborah

Well obviously writing good content is key, but if you’ve been dropped from indexing by the largest search engine for traffic going, how does that help you if you don’t already have a largely established readership?

@ Anonymous, when each new post is indexed, how is it that the crawlers don’t decipher links within a post?