Google hates Text Link Ads
January 17, 2008
A lot of people know it. Some blogged about it. Matt Cutts himself confirmed it.
Google hates paid links.
But our site is a testament to how Google particularly dislikes the paid text advertising program Text Link Ads or TLA.
PinoyMoneyTalk.com used to have a PR of 4 prior to the Google PageRank chaos that engulfed the blogosphere in late October last year. The commotion stems from Google ’s move to slap sites that supposedly sold links with a PageRank penalty. This site, along with several other sites, lost 2 PRs. That is, our PR4 became PR2.
In response, we removed all links in the site that promote TLA and stopped getting direct paid link ads. We cannot totally disable TLA then because some ad campaigns were running during that time.
Google saw the change and upgraded our PR to 3. All’s well that ends well? Not really.
In early January 2008 — just a week or two ago — Google updated PRs again and, surprise!, this site’s PR has gone all the way down from 3 to 0. Yup Pagerank zero as in nilch, nada, nothing, none.
It is at this point that we decided to totally forget about Text Link Ads. We disabled the TLA InLinks Program plugin in the blog and stopped getting TLA ads.
Voila! Two days later after the change, this site’s PageRank was up again, but not just to 3 but to its original PR of 4 (see screenshot).
We can confirm that Text Link Ads was indeed the culprit for our PR downgrade because after completely removing all TLA’s ads on the site — and doing that and nothing else — we got our PR 4 back.
TLA does provide a nice addition to our Adsense income, but if we are to choose between Google and TLA, there really is not much of a choice. If only TLA can find a way not to violate Google’s Webmaster policies, say put a nofollow attribute to their links, then we’d willingly embrace them back.
For now, we are happy that this site’s original PR is back. Hopefully, the increased PR translates to higher ranking in Google search which then converts to more visits to the site which, in turn, boosts our Google Adsense income, replacing the foregone TLA earnings.
Wishful thinking but still… ;)
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May 20th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Nice Articles you have there. Very informative. Bit, i have a Question:
Will google penalized me for having TLA from Kontera, aswell? Cuz, i have Kontera running on my blog for the last couple of months, n i dont think this as affected my page rank at all. What do you say?
Also, i few days back i got penalized for having ads, not from kontera but from Adbrite, because my traffic from google ( search engine ) drastically reduced. Although i have removed the code, but no luck yet :( What should i do now??
March 19th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I just knew it by now. Good that I have read it.
March 4th, 2008 at 5:46 am
If you sell them privately I think it would be hard for Google to detect and penalise you.
February 29th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
darn! so does this mean that there is no hope having text links ads without being penalized by google?
January 21st, 2008 at 11:29 pm
True, it may be Google’s way of fending off competition in the online advertising arena. In our case, our Adsense income is way above our TLA earnings so we really don’t have that much of a choice if we are to choose between the two.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:55 pm
I reckon Google just hates someone having a “better” way to monetize their sites besides adsense. I think PMT did the appropriate move in weighing which channel is beneficial.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Exactly, and Google does play God sometimes because they want everyone to live by their rules. But since more than 50% of online searches are done in Google and a lot of traffic for sites come from Google search results, webmasters can’t help but just follow what Google wants.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Let us know if and when you get your original PR back, Jam. I hope you get it soon.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Good luck, sylv3rbalde. Better safe than sorry, right?
January 20th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Interesting. I think I’ll remove TLA from my site now. TY for the update.