Comments on: It’s Getting Tougher to Make Money From Blogging

By: Breakdown Recovery

Breakdown Recovery — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:27:04 +0000

If you links are relevant to the subject matter there will not be an issue, unless Google knows you are taking money from it and to what extent. You have to ask the question about large authority sites like the bbc.
It also sells advertising space. What about the national newspaper websites, who also sell advertisng space that involves a link to the sponsers website.

I think If things are relevant, you will not have an issue. in fact if the link is very relevant to the subject matter, there are those who think it will help you in rankings.

Mark

By: John

John — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:18:33 +0000

PageRank and Google SE results are not necessarily related. One of my blogs ranks high in SE results, but has a PR0. PageRank is just one of many internal metrics that Google uses for SE results. In fact, some believe they’re not used at all anymore.

Paid text links do infact affect results. Google’s job is to present the best content for a search, and not surprisingly, inbound links is a large part of the equation. However, with paid links, it’s easy for a site to buy that link-love, without having to worry about having good content. So, really, Google didn’t have much of a choice with paid text links becoming so popular.

I’m not immune to the change either. I have one site with paid text links that has just dropped from PR5 to PR4. It’s going to take a huge chunk out of my earnings. Am I upset, yes? Do I understand, yes.

By: fivecentnickel.com

fivecentnickel.com — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 21:30:20 +0000

Lazy Man nailed it. The Google money machine is driven by an accurate search engine. Paid text links “pollute” their search algorithm, making the results less reliable. A graphic ad doesn’t do this because there’s no “anchor text” (the words that represent the link — Google uses these links/words to figure out where to rank a page for searches on certain terms.

If Google’s search engine becomes unreliable, then the entire rest of their business will fall apart. In my view, this has little (if anything) to do with caring about someone making money from ads outside of Google channels, and virtually everything to do with protecting the golden goose (i.e., accurate search results).

By: EnoughWealth

EnoughWealth — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:27:34 +0000

My page rank dropped from 4 to 2 recently, probably because I had some PayPerPost textlink ads (clearly tagged as such), and some AdBrite ads (in place of adsense, which doesn’t pay much for low traffic sites).

I’m going to delete the links from the oldest PayPerPost sponsored posts, as they’ve had their 30 days exposure. I recently put in four “permanent” textlink ads for a one-off payment (only $150 for 4, as I’m a relatively low traffic site, and hadn’t been approached by advertisers before). Since I agreed for these to be permanent I can’t get rid of them now. Hopefully once theses posts are several months old and off my main page they won’t impact PR much (?).

I did notice the comment that putting “Sponsors” above links could be a bad move – I’ll change it to an image on my site in case that helps.

I can’t help thinking that this change is more about google trying to monopolise the textlink ad marketplace with Adsense. They already forbid you from using any other context sensitive advertising on a site that uses Adsense, this is just the next step in eliminating competition. I don’t think it will improve the relevance of search results – although some sites obviously buy textlinks to “game” the ranking system, this change is more likely to eliminate sites that DO have relevant content, but are just trying to generate some revenue from their sites. Google probably wants the advertisers to pay for AdWords rather than textlink ads that aren’t via AdSense.

By: Rob Lewis

Rob Lewis — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:17:18 +0000

I’m with Flexo – although it could backfire in the future, I’ve seen no correlation between a drop in Page Rank and search engine rankings, so will sit tight with the ads for the moment. I think the ultimate effect will be to have less effect on the rankings of the sites buying the links, not the seller.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 06:54:22 +0000

Do no evil, eh?

By: Flexo

Flexo — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 01:07:10 +0000

While Google has the right to do whatever they want to make their search results more relevant, I’m not making any changes until I see that PageRank has any relevance for anything other than selling text link ads. It seems to have no relation to search result placement…

By: plonkee

plonkee — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:31:46 +0000

I think that your pandering to google won’t help you. And they shouldn’t give a monkey’s where your links come from as long as they don’t distort search.

By: mapgirl

mapgirl — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:09:54 +0000

JLP – If your logic is true about banner ads, then that explains why having an exclusive ad contract dropped me from PR5 to PR0 permanently. I took the ads off when the contract ended and now I have no PR whatsoever. YAY.

However, I don’t think banners and text link ads are treated the same.

By: JLP

JLP — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:24:44 +0000

BD,

I’m guessing you don’t get paid for what you do?

Give me a break! It’s not like I’m writing posts littered with affiliate links that nobody knows about. Heck, you didn’t even know I was selling links!

Finally, I did change my policy several months ago to include (Affiliate Link) behind any affiliate link (usually a link to Amazon). I don’t know how much more upfront I can be.