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John Chow had an excellent post on how he was able to generate over $3000 a month on his less-than-year old blog. Among other things, John has affiliate links that generate some sales each month, he has Google Adsense as well as Intellitext ads, text link ads, Feedburner ads and sponsored reviews (Review Me):
- Direct Ad Sales: $750.00
- Text Links Ads: $621.68
- Affiliate Sales: $545.00
- Google AdSense: $536.58
- Vibrant IntelliTXT: $478.18
- TTZ Media: $183.54
- FeedBurner Ads: $175.68
- ReviewMe: $150.00
- Grand Total for January 2007: $3,440.66
I like how John has utilized a number of different revenue sources to really grow his blog’s profitability. But I have to take issue with his use of text link ads on his site. While I’m all for utilizing a site’s real estate to maximize revenue, the practice can get your site in trouble with the search engines, especially Google. Since the text link ads are static links (without the nofollow attribute), they pass on “Google Juice” which affects the search engine rankings. In other words, search engines like Google might consider text link ads to be manipulative of their index.
It’s been publicly stated by Matt Cutts that Google is on the watch for manipulation techniques like this and may attempt to devalue those links and possibly all other links originating from the offending site. Other penalties may include devaluing the links coming into the site. In all cases, that’s bad news for your site.
If you depend on search engines for a lot of your traffic, you may find yourself out in the cold and out of their indices if you are judged to be manipulating their indices. But hey, if your blog is not very dependent on organic search engine traffic, you may decide to take a chance and go ahead and accept text link ads. A lot of big sites do. Sites like:
- Problogger
- The Blog Herald
- B5 Media blogs
- AOL’s Weblogs Inc. blogs
But, these blogs have established reputation and a lot of exposure, even without the search engines. Much of their visitors come from other than organic search. Until your blog has reached that level of exposure, you want to be friends with the search engines–and that means complying with their rules and avoiding controversial SEO techniques such as text link ads that could get you and your site banned from their indices.
If you are unfamiliar with how text link ads can be used to spam the search engine results, check out the following links:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
collis 02.28.07 at 10:43 pm
This is an interesting point, I’d not considered Google’s view of TLA. I guess its a matter of time before they crack down, but the problem is I don’t understand how they can differentiate between something like text link ads and a blogroll for instance. But i guess thats why i am not a Google engineer
Karthik 08.29.07 at 2:06 pm
Now that TLA has switched to TinyURL, they are going to be tougher to crack - can’t expect Google to ban TinyURL as a whole - but who knows? Has anyone heard of MSN banning .info domains?