Oct 17 2008
Thinking About Giving Text Links Ads the Heave-Ho
I think Text Link Ads are bringing me down. My living in London site is, I think, a damn good site and it’s never creeped off of PR0. My backpacking site has been in steady decline dropping from a PR4 to a PR2 over the past several months and now my working holiday site has been knocked from PR4 down to PR0. Text Link Ads have been on both of those sites for a long time and I’m guessing the PR drop has something to do with TLA.
TLA aren’t really even contributing much to my monthly earnings these days anyways. They started at about $140 and each month that’s dropped a little at a time. Well this month has seen a huge drop and I’m only likely to earn $60 if I’m lucky. It’s not really the number of links that is dropping, it’s the price paid per link. This probably has a lot to do with my spiraling PR.
So I’ve started to question whether $60 a month is worth having to accept the possible negative things associated with Text Link Ads. We know Google isn’t a fan of link sales and TLA make it pretty easy for the big G to see that you’re selling links. I haven’t been effected in the search engine results at all. My London site and working holiday sites both rank at number one for their search terms which makes things even more confusing.
My London site gets a lot of traffic, it ranks well in the SERPS, ithas loads of original content and I know that it deserves a PR of above zero so I’m going to take Text Links Ads off of that site starting in November and see if there’s any jump in the site’s PR. If there is you can bet I’ll be giving Text Link Ads the heave-ho on all my sites.
I’ll let you know what happens. Come on PR!
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if u already rank well in the SERPS and traffic isn’t decreasing, then why do care about the PR?
I don’t really care that much, it’s more of an experiment. Although with my London site I think there is a lot of potential or direct link sales and I’d feel better approaching people and companies with a PR of better than zero.
Hi Kirsty,
I also think your london site deserves a good PR. I started my website newtomontreal.com well after your london site I believe… and it’s now PR3. So yours should be at least showing a PR. You also have an alexa ranking that does not match with a PR0. Something’s does not work…
I had TLA on some of my sites last year but remove it from all. I do think it does not help with the big G search engine.
I think you worry about PR too much. I think it is better to count the number of incoming links you have. I am only using TLA on my blog, which stopped worrying too much about promoting these days.
Seems like Google affects your websites in three important ways: sends traffic via search engine, provides income via adsense and provides a measurement of how important your website is in general via PR ranking.
It wants to be your only pal in cyberspace but your flirting with a competitor, namely TLA, that is not only a different company but represents a whole other way (biz module) of selling adspace from how Google does it and who decided early on (in the days while google was ad free) that buying links to your site was just as bad indicator of how good your site was as if you were a scientist paying other scientists to cite your works and thus rise in importance within the academic society); where the basic system of measuring importance of websites was borrowed from.
So Google as a entity is conflicted in the way it raises your sites in search results and how it measures your PR? Former remains steady or rises while the later goes down?
Maybe if Googles as a web entity is likened to a what neuroscientists say about the human brain (that after all made Google) then perhaps PR is the entities right side of the brain and it’s understandable that it would try to muscle a competitor your of the market by showing it’s dissaprooval in this way.
But if the logical right part of Googles digital-uber-brain continues to function in a cold impartial way and continues to send you traffic then … don’t know, what part of your brain do you make money with?
Perhaps to scifi? Maybe I should check this with that beer goggle software
Left is logical, right is emotional part of the brain supposedly, sorry for this edit.
Yeah, I pulled them from my site a very long time ago. It was obvious they were only looking for PR, while the amount TLA was charging was silly. I’ve made the same amount *per day* as TLA paid per month - annoying.
At the same time - I think its important to recognise that Google is not god and your actions shouldn’t be governed by arbitrary numbers on a toolbar.
While your traffic stays good you shouldn’t worry too much.
Other suggestions: projectwonderful is an interesting advertising project. The current clientele tends to be comic and etsy related, but it could be useful for managing advertisers that you find yourself?
Always enjoy reading what you are up to lately
I think getting rid of text links is a positive step forward. The big G have on numerous occasions stated their dislike of selling text links this way.
Like Google or not I think that is reason enough.
Dump textlink ads. This issue came out about them almost 2 years ago now. Yes as mentioned above, PR is pretty meaningless as far a Google Search is concerned. However PR is still important to link buyers. Important for no good reason, but they’ll pay more for PR no matter how meaningless it is.
I’d say get rid of TLA and sell privately yourself. Plus I’ve always thought TLAs 50% share was totally ridiculous and unfair.
I think one of the main reasons I want to scrap them, beyond the PR thing, is that they are paying peanuts these days. It doesn’t seem worth taking on any risk for the amount they’re paying. I hate that Google want to control everything and tell me how to run my site and I’d like to give them the finger an djust do what I want. But TLA aren’t making it worth my while anymore so getting rid of them would sort of be a combination of that and my fear of whatever havoc the Big G might one day decide to bestowe on me.
I’m really mainly curious to see what sort of effect scrapping TLA will have. I wonder if my London site’s PR will jump up like I expect it to or maybe it’s stuck on PR0 for some other reason? A major reason I want to get off the goose egg is to start flogging links on this site myself. It’s a competetive market and I think lots of businesses would be willing to pay a lot more than TLA to get a piece of the link action.
G cracked down a year ago on TLA, PPP and sponsored posts. They are big no-nos.
If you have given TLA the heave you can apply to G for reconsideration for each site, using G’s webmaster tools. I did last year and went from a 2 to a 10.
I went from a PR4 to PR0 on my backpacking site thanks to text links. It didn’t hurt my rankings of course, but it did cause quite a big decrease in the number of sites interested in linking and partnering with me…maybe its just their perception of a site that gets damaged.
I agree with most of the comments, and am going to dump my text links as soon as the current advertising agreement is up.
- Greg
I wouldn’t expect the PR to jump back on its own.
You’ll probably need to do a reconsideration request on WMT to get it to come back in any reasonable timeframe, if at all.
What is WMT? I’ve heard about people contacting Google to reconsider. Does anyone know how this is done. Taking them off in a couple days… should be interesting to see if anything happens.
Kristy:
WMT is G’s Web Master Tools. On the main page (after logging in), in the right sidebar is a link to “request reconsideration.” You need to explain why you should be reconsidered, ie. apologies and say you won’t do it again.
If the powers-that-be agree, your PR should be readjusted when the next PR update is done. When I did it, it took two months to go from a 2 to a 4.
Interesting case studies here. I can confirm Google is against link buying, and its best avoided.
However, a good alternative is textlinkbrookers.com, who’s links remain under google’s radar, for now at least.
Regards,
Review-Hostel.com