DWS Extra

Yes. I am. Heh heh.

If you have been blogging for a while, you know what TLA is. Text Link Ads are those little text links that you see on some blogs and sites that link directly to another website.

Essentially what does TLA do? It offers bloggers a way to monetize their blog by using those 3-4 word text ads which link directly to an advertiser’s website.

This would be one of the most natural ways of advertising and monetization on the Web, if only Google were not around. Funnily, TLA is big news because of Google too.

What a text link ad from a blog attempts to do is to pass some PR to the advertiser’s site. If the link is from a related site, even better.

Now as far as Google is concerned, paid links are a strict no-no. Matt Cutts has often advised against it, and asked people to report such paid links to Google.

The thing is, while it may seem quite natural to give a text link to another website for money, the money is there mostly for the PR which might be passed to the advertiser. It is not for traffic, and everyone concerned acknowledges that.

But this undercuts Google’s flawed system of trying to rank sites based on the links to them. Flawed, because the Web is not a free-linking, academic Web of 1996-2000 but a cut-throat business arena now where big and small publishers and shops are trying to make a living.

But TLA is extremely popular, and that makes me jealous. A single text link can be a few good dollars, and a few of them on a page, and thousands of such pages… means a lot of good money. And there are a lot of people doing that.

My estimate is that the money one can make from Text Link Ads will anyday beat the money you can make from using Adsense. We at DWS use Adsense. And Adsense itself is ten times better than any of those CPM ad programs.

So yes, I am jealous. I know they are making good money, and I want to jump in too into the feeding frenzy.

However, The FUD spread by Matt Cutts has got me too. So I know that it is possible for Google to recognise the TLA patterns. Cutts says one should use a rel=nofollow on paid links. rel=nofollow is against TLA’s terms. So there. Follow TLA’s terms and possibly get in Google’s bad books and lose any ability to pass link juice and PR - or take the risk and make money while you can.

I am too afraid to take the risk, though sometimes I fret and fume at Google’s methods of controlling the Web to suit their search engine. But then it all soon becomes rhetoric, and the fact is that Google has jacked this site before for no reason I could identify, and they might do it for a good reason the next time. Can’t afford to take that risk; I have people to pay, mouths to feed… !

Even more tempting is ReviewMe. I just saw a site offering ReviewMe reviews. he was charging $ 250 for a blog post! Granted that it was a PR6 blog. But lowly me too can probably get $ 50, can’t I? Ah, my world turns green….

Anyway, ReviewMe too is essentially just selling PR. I believe that a site should be able to sell advertorials on its pages the same way newspapers have advertorials. But then it affects Google’s precious results, and we can’t do that.

You guys who use TLA and ReviewMe, good luck to you. You might turn out smarter than I am in the end, and nothing may happen to your sites. May they always be able to pass PR, and link-juice. May you never lose rankings, may no dreaded 950-penalty hit you. However, I have been hit badly before for reasons which no one ever explained to me. Maybe it was a 950-penalty, maybe it was subdomain spam, maybe it was a 302 hijack. But hit I was, and for 6 months and then again for two months, this site crashed in Google SERPs, seriously making me reconsider taking any risks. So on you go, pioneers. I shall stick to the safe, well-trodden tracks for monetizing this site. May the Force be with you!