It’s no suprise I’m a big fan of Matt Cutts over at Google and his blog is a regular read for me (although I wish he would get off the gadgets kick and back onto the SEO track). Sometimes I inadvertantly miss important issues posted to his blog either due to lack of time to read every day or because the topic being discussed is not a topic I am familiar with at the moment. Chalk it up to the latter case for me regarding my missing Matt’s post April 14th 2007 post How to report paid links. At the time, I had not utilized the service provided by Text-Link-Ads, in fact, I had just signed up an account and was shopping through their catalogue of websites, looking for other sites to advertise on. I set my budget at about $150 per month for purchasing text links and testing the service to see if it would be worth my advertising dollars considering I’d long ago discarded Google AdWords and YPN (Yahoo’s AdWords clone) as advertising options.
Yes, you heard me right, I mentioned Matt Cutts from Google and AdWords being useless from an advertisers point of view in the same paragraph above. Am I crazy? am I stupid? am I SEO-suicidal? No, but I am honest… and the cold hard fact is that I was spending upwards of $900 per month with Google Adwords and getting absolutely nothing but useless, non-converting traffic from their advertising program. Over the course of 2004-2005, I spent roughly $10,000 to promote fourteen sites using Google AdWords and it was not effective for my business. Is this Google’s fault? Not at all. Only a fool would think every advertising program works for every product or service. So, what did I do? I started searching out other websites and blogs that were in the same niche market as the websites I was promoting who were selling banner ads or text ads without a third party managment system or ad broker (in essence, cut out the middleman). I set my advertising budget at a fraction of what I was spending on AdWords and the results were significantly more beneficial as my prior experience with AdWords. As a businessman, I have been in brick and mortar business long before the internet and my family owned a chain of gift shops, a few hotels and a restaurant, of which I learned that advertising is not about “making friends”, it’s about “making money” through reaching a target demographic.
These days I don’t have the time or patience to search out sites to advertise on and to maintain a relationship with the owners of those sites and make sure the ads are still active, so when I heard about Text-Link-Ads, I thought it sounded like a pretty good idea because even though I would be adding the middleman (ad broker) once again, at least I would have a choice of sites I wanted to advertise on. Particularly, with Text-Link-Ads, I sought out bloggers who had impressed me with their writing and I wanted to reward them for their hard work and efforts in exchange for advertising space on their respective blogs. I made sure to match the sites I am advertising with publishers of related content, and although TLA shows the Google PageRank of a particular page for perspective advertisers, I did not select sites with a high PageRank in order to have the PageRank passed to my sites. Quite conversely, I selected sites with low PageRanks but large amounts of original content, with admins who showed a personalized touch to their sites, who had more or less been ignored in the Google PageRank algorithm. Quite honestly, we all know that PageRank doesn’t mean diddly squat if you don’t have content, visitors or readers. Many PR3 and under sites still manage to have high visibility through social networking and by acquiring overlooked or less obvious keywords to bring in a steady supply of hits. I personally think Text-Link-Ads is providing a great service for the individual bloggers and webmasters to monetize their sites, while providing an effective advertising mechanism for people such as myself.
Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw Matt’s afformentioned post, essentially telling people to tattletale or snitch on people purchasing Text-Link-Ads for their sites or people selling text links on their sites!!! I can empathize with Matt’s example of a Linux site having paid text links for prescription drugs or unrelated content, but seriously, to encourage people to snitch on other webmasters is just putting out the fire with gasoline.
Why? Obviously this opens yet another back doorway of opportunity for competing webmasters to “take out” another competitors site. How? Easy… Suppose Mary Jane has a site dedicated to floral arrangments and her competitor Susan decided she wants to have Mary Jane’s site penalized, well, for as little as $20, Susan can place Mary Jane’s text link on some sleazy, junk website and then report her to the Google stormtroopers and bang, Mary Jane’s site will fall into the Google supplemental trash can if not get delisted from the Google index entirely.
I don’t care how much Matt Cutt’s tries to slice and dice it, the fact is Google is the biggest purveyor of text link ads on the internet. Granted Matt divulges that the ads produced by Google have no SEO value because they are not direct text links which pass PageRank, but any experienced webmaster or even regular Google users will agree with me that nine times out of ten, a Google “sponsored search” result at the top of every search page is usually what you’re *not* looking for. However, I have to be the first to admit that if you delve below the sponsored links, the Google search algorithm is pretty darn good and I will also be the first to admit that I have sites with no PageRank or PR1 that appear on the first page of the SERP’s due to quality content and not overabusing keywords. BUT, I still don’t agree with the “snitching” and I certainly don’t agree with a website being penalized for selling Text-Link-Ads or for advertisers purchasing them. It’s all about making money, and when one company tries to impose it’s views on such a mass scale as Google is trying to do to protect their AdWords program, it reeks of the darker side of business, and “bad neighborhoods”. Granted, TLA is cutting into Google’s profit margin, and Google’s spokespeople will say whatever they have to defend their precious cushy jobs, 401K’s and perks their company offers them, but in all honesty, does that show *integrity* or *honesty* ? No, it doesn’t. In my opinion, this whole “snitching” on other webmasters crusade is just wrong.
Please feel free to comment or discuss this topic.
Please Note: I am not cutting Google down as a whole, they provide many useful services, however, I am expressing my opinion on this concept of “snitching” and this backdoor approach to taking Text-Link-Ads out of business by making webmasters fearful of using their services either as a publisher or an advertiser.
