Hi, my name is Donncha and I used to have text-link-ads on my blog. They’re gone now but only after Google slapped me into submission and reduced my page rank to 4. Initially I felt angry and shocked that this happened but I have no excuse, I heard it from the horses mouth, I knew it was coming. I was one of those evil unscrupulous demons who manipulated the pagerank of other sites for money. My guilty conscience is somewhat alleviated by the fact that I refused to show a text link ad for a Viagra spammer yesterday morning. Oh well.
Google’s own advertising, Adsense, is still running here, as is Kontera, (leave a comment and you’ll never see them, isn’t that nice?) and the competitive ad filter advice I gave out a few days ago really makes a difference to your bottom line. Just ask Justin!
What’s in store for the future? Keep an eye on this blog. WordPress MU 1.3 is coming real soon now. There are going to be lots more free and GPLed WordPress plugins, including a pretty cool digg proof cache that also works in WordPress MU. Think of it as WP-Cache on afterburner! A couple of sites are already testing it with positive results. I’m watching the access_log roll by on a server as a digg is happening now. Load average is hovering around 1 and the page loads quickly. Sweet.
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What are the Kontera ads? Are they any different to googles?
To be honest I’ve never seen ads on your site (sorry!) I’m pretty religious about removing ads of all kinds and variety on any sites that I look at. Mainly because they get in the way.
If you are curious, this is what your site looks like unadulterated:
http://www.sweetnam.eu/images/donncha.jpg
It’s a cropped jpg with medium compression which is why there are defined gradients.
So glad to see these off your site, it looks better already.
Hi! I’d actually enjoy learning more about this WP-Cache on steroids you talk about. I presume you avoid the database directly, and just manage to serve up static content? Either way, it could be interesting, even as a devzone article on mysql.
Robert – clear the cookies for ocaoimh.ie from your browser and go to any of my older posts. You’ll see the ads then. I’m honestly glad you never saw them however, that’s the way it’s supposed to be 🙂
Matt – thanks 🙂
Colin – yup, that’s right. You won’t have long to wait. I’m hoping to release it next week!
Justice is done. 🙂
Seriously, though, possibly the biggest issue with those text link ads was that most users _didn’t know_ that they were an attempt to manipulate Pagerank; they thought that they were just conventional ads. The broker should have made it far clearer, and in particular should have mentioned that they were against Google’s policies.
I must admit that I considered using them at one point; they looked like very easy money for anyone who had a vaguely high-ranking site. Glad I didn’t now…
I played around with text link ads lately,
to see how they worked (ocaoimh.ie was getting
a nice price IIRC (over $100/link/month)).
Wouldn’t putting rel=”nofollow” in the links placate google?
It wouldn’t make the link broker very happy, though, as it would defeat the whole point…
It may devalue the link placement somewhat,
but would not “defeat the whole point”, as
the links are visible to end users who can click through,
just like for google’s adds.
I can tell you without any real fear of contradiction that someone who is paying hundreds of dollars a month for one inconspicuous link on a website which has no relation to what they do doesn’t give a damn about end users clicking through.
It’s different if it’s targeted advertising on a related site, of course, but 99.9% of ‘text link ads’ had nothing to do with the site that they were on.
I’ve just this weekend removed text-link-ads from a website I run that recently had it’s PageRank slammed down to zero and, more importantly, gets much less google traffic than it did even a few days ago.
I see as of today your PageRank hasn’t yet been restored but have you found any difference in traffic to your site since removing the ads?
It’s obviously way to early for me to tell.
My sites PR was reduced to 3 from 5. May be you were not slapped but the reason may be different. You should make a search for your backlinks. Your backlinks may be reduced in Pr or total number. Google recently I think have changed the algoritma which caused major drops in PR values. In fact PR will have no value in near future.
May be you were not slapped by Google but in fact your backlinks were reduced in total number or in PR values.
google is a cruel and unusual force on the net but a force none the less and its actions may on;y be questioned by those with something lost