Last month I decided to try something new, and I signed up at Text-Link-Ads in order to get paid for publishing links to other websites from my site. At first it looked like an easy way to do a little monetization of this blog, but in retrospect I would have to say it wasn’t worth it.
If you’re not familiar with Text-Link-Ads, it is a service where a person can either pay a certain amount to have other sites link to them, or you can be paid for hosting those links. Granted, it violates Google’s law on paid links but a lot of sites do this every day.
After I signed up I only had to wait a day or two before 5 people signed up to be listed on my site. The monetary amounts they paid to do so were small, and after Text-Link-Ads took a 50% cut, the amount was laughable. But at that time I didn’t mind too much; this was my first time trying something like this out and I wanted to see how well it would work for me.
Those 5 advertisers stayed with my site until the end of last month and beginning on the 1st of May one of them dropped out leaving the 4 remaining advertisers. Since my start with this, I had 5 quick signups and no interest afterwards.
Everything so far remained smooth with Text-Link-Ads until a week or two ago. I started to notice that my site wasn’t getting as much love from Google as it used to. I know that the only thing to have changed on my site was the addition of these paid links, so I assumed that I may have been slightly penalized for their inclusion on my site. I have no hard data to back this up, but it has a ring of truth to it.
If you understand some of the principles of linking and search engines, you know that websites that link to another site deemed to be a “bad neighbor” often get penalized by the search engines. My thoughts were leaning towards the idea that I may have been linking to someone that may be on Googles bad list.
In the end, there were a couple of things that I took issue with concerning Text-Link-Ads, and those reasons are:
- According to their Terms of Service, I am not allowed to modify the code that displays on my site. Therefore, I am unable to convert the paid links to “nofollow” in order to stay within the good graces of Google et al.
- By removing the paid links yesterday I forfeited all monetary gains made this month. Yep, Text-Link-Ads kept what I should have earned for the 19 days I posted those links.
- I felt that my decline in Google love can be directly attributed to the fact that I was publishing those links on my site. Maybe things would have gone a little better in that department had I shown a little more diligence in investigating who I was linking to.
- With the 50% cut of the payment taken out by Text-Link-Ads, the money I made for posting these paid links seemed hardly worth the potential costs of pissing off Google.
Have you ever used the services of a text link broker such as Text-Link-Ads? If so, what was your experience like?