It was fun while it lasted.
OK, maybe not “fun” necessarily, but maybe “satisfying”, in that it was nice to make enough money off my blog to cover the cost of my VPS hosting plan plus a bit of extra spending money every now and then. But, alas, as of right now, I’m ending that relationship, despite the fact that it’s been relatively good so far.
In fact, one reason it’s been pretty “good” (at least the way I look at it) is that the ads were so unobtrusive that most of you who read this probably didn’t even notice that I had added them a while back. To be honest, that was a big part of the attraction of TLA for me, because I didn’t want ads cluttering things up and distracting from the content.
Getting back to the decision to quit, there were several talks this weekend at WordCamp that got me thinking about this subject - namely Jeremy Wright’s session on “Blog Monetization” and Matt Cutts’ “Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers”. The bottom line is that the reason TLA works and the reason advertisers pay good money for ads through it is that (for now at least) it essentially exploits what you might consider a “hole” in Google’s Page Rank system. (I say “for now” because I see a lot of “writing on the wall” that those days may be coming to an end.)
Perhaps a brief summary is in order for those not familiar with the whole process, and may not understand why people would pay good money for a link on someone’s blog. The reason text links work is that Google (and other SE’s) attribute a certain amount of value to links you put in your blog, and that value is influenced by the value (in this case, PageRank) of your blog itself. The idea being that the act of you linking is interpreted as your endorsement, and if you endorse something, that means something. The more people who endorse “you” also makes your endorsement mean that much more. With such a ripe potential for profit, an industry inevitably sprang up to capitalize on it, and that’s where we are today.
Whether you think it’s ethical to “game” Google and other search engines is an interesting debate, but I will say that I am now leaning towards the side of being against it for a variety of reasons. Even if you don’t mind linking to stuff from your site because someone pays you to rather than because you naturally would otherwise (which I don’t really have a problem with at all), you still have to consider the consequences of such actions. In the end, if such tactics actually remain effective, it will only serve to pollute the accuracy of search results that we have all come to know and love (and even rely on, to varying degrees), and this hurts everyone - including people who are not directly involved or even aware of it. I think perhaps Paul said it best:
“Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive. Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others. - 1 Corinthians 10:23-24
But, just in case an ethical argument isn’t enough (and I’m sure for many, it isn’t, especially if they don’t agree with my take on it), perhaps a reality-check and cold, hard logic is in order. Even though the Google algorithms don’t currently penalize blogs that sell such links, they (1) have a clear history of acting to remove (from their index) sites who are making attempts to artificially raise their rank in the results, and (2) have been making more and more statements recently directly discouraging this specific type of ad technique. So, once they eventually do decide to penalize blogs selling text links (and right now, in my mind, that’s a “when” not “if”), your PageRank will suffer if you are caught up in that particular net. Ideally, they’d give you a warning and an opportunity to choose to take them down before just acting, but there’s nothing that says they’d have to; your site could literally drop off of Google overnight.
I don’t know about you, but personally, I place a higher value on my Google ranking than the money I’ve made using text links. Even if I were to look at it just based on the numbers (which I personally don’t think is the most important reason), it just doesn’t make sense. I’ve made far more money doing custom WP development than I ever have from ads, and I hope to do more of the same in the future. My ability to do so would be severely impacted by not showing up in Google search results; it’s as simple as that, if that’s the kind of reason you’re looking for.
For those of you who I know (and those that I don’t as well) who choose to stay with TLA for the foreseeable future, I wish you luck, and don’t judge you for it in any way. I would be interested in hearing how it goes for you in the coming months. I’d especially be interested to hear the take of some fairly “high profile” bloggers who are also quite public about their involvement with TLA, like Alex King.
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[...] When you really think about it, it’s no better than any of the other spam techniques widely despised by the internet community, and this was the reason I personally decided to drop them recently. [...]
[...] For some reason, TLA keeps selling ads for me, even though I canceled my account a week ago. [...]
[...] a follow-up to the articles I posted earlier (first, second), it appears that Google has begun to penalize sites for selling PageRank via text links, [...]
18 Comments
Or you can just add rel=”nofollow” and see what happens.
Apparently that won’t work.
To elaborate further… even if nofollow would work, I wouldn’t use it because I don’t think it would be fair to the advertisers.
The bottom line is that people paying for Text Link Ads are doing so because it helps their PageRank. Adding nofollow explicitly prevents this from happening, and so, in a sense, you would be cheating the advertisers out of what they paid for.
I did consider doing this, but after thinking it through I’d rather just do without the ads altogether than try to game TLA.
PPS - I believe the hammer has already started to drop, since TLA itself apparently has Google dings against them.
Will you consider WP Text Ads? nofollow is enabled by default (you can turn it off), and you pay no commissions. You can also sell ads for the whole blog, home page and per-post.
It is unethical to buy links for the same of juicing up pagerank. For that reason, you will not find a site’s PR at the Marketplace.
With Google coming down on such practices, prices for text link ads will probably fall, but it’s a good thing as advertiser revenue may be shared across more sites.
I have seen your posts - a lot of them actually - you seem to be commenting on every Google/TLA blog post out there
- and it does look interesting; very much like TLA but without trying to game the PageRank system.
Looks like a good service, but I think for now I’m just going to go the ad-free route. I’ll be sure to check out WP Text Ads in the future if I do decide to use advertising.
A smilie? Hm.
The plugin seems cool except you can’t sell links yourself as good as TLA or other brokers can.
Yeah, I had checked it out before (in looking into the TLA thing more), but it isn’t for me right now anyway. I do believe that they offer some sort of assistance in selling your ads, but I didn’t look into it too deeply.
To be honest, I was actually a little put off by the huge number of comments I’ve seen on other blogs by the person that runs WP Text Ads, pimping the service. They’re literally on nearly every story I’ve seen discussing this TLA issue, which borders on spam in my mind.
Definitely pimping border line spam. Why does your comment feed take so long in Google Reader to update? It seems every blog feed is slower now.
I haven’t noticed the slowness. Your comment before this one was moderated at first though, so that could explain it if you were looking for it in the feed. I didn’t approve it until right before I posted that last comment.
Looks like GReader picked that last one up after about 20 minutes, which isn’t too bad.
JB, Dan.
I try to make useful comments on this nofollow issue where I can. Is this worse than ‘Well done!’ as a comment?
However, I understand your concerns. Thanks for your reminders guys and I will keep this in mind.
I was astounded to see more than 19,000 links with the phrase “wp text ads” on Google. But a large majority of the posts are duplicated or scrapped content.
Dan, there is a Marketplace for WP Text Ads users to connect with advertisers. It’s still in its infancy though.
Thank you for writing this, I had just enabled TLA on my site for the first time in a year when I saw this post. Thank god I read it first, now I’ve taken them down again. In face, reading your article inspired me to do some more research and blog about Google Penalty for Using Text Links Ads. I hope others read it (and your article) and do the same.
OK, I have some text link ads from TLA. Each of them links to relevant sites, no viagra, no online casinos, no dubious stuffs. And still Big G demoted my site from PR6 to PR4 (fortunately this doesn’t seem to affect my organic traffic).
So what should we do? I mean, we’re not supposed to sell text links, yet there is no way G’s algorithms can tell the difference between natural and paid links. Unless they do manual reviews.
Paranoia sets in. From now on we won’t dare not to put nofollow tag. We want to play safe, no?
I wonder what would happened if everyone begins to use nofollow tag for all external linkings?
It doesn’t matter whether the links are “relevant” or not. If you are selling them to game the PageRank system (which is the whole point of TLA’s ads), then you are violating Google’s policies and they have every right to adjust your ranking in their system accordingly.
You can try adding nofollow to your text link ads, but then you would be in violation of your TOS with them, because their whole point is to sell PageRank.
True. But even if I remove TLA from my site, how about my other external links? The ones that’d already existed before TLA. Should I manually insert “nofollow” tag for each and every one of them now?
Either way, lesson learned. Big G has the last vote. I’m going to drop TLA from my site.
No, because normal links (not paid for) are “natural” and a part of why Google’s algorithm works.
It’s only the paid links that disrupt that, which is why paid links are required to use nofollow in order to avoid that problem. That’s why other ad systems (including Google’s) use nofollow on their text links.