[nightfall]

Can someone please explain to me what is text link advertising and how is this different from Google or Yahoo text link ads?

Or are the the same ?

Thanks

[puravida]

Sure, no problem. Basically...

"Text Link Advertising" is any form of advertising that uses a link and link text to entice a visitor to click on it and be taken to your site/page.

Google AdSense and Yahoo Search Ads are both a type of text link ad, but there is a distinction. These are what I have termed "Search Engine (SE) Friendly Text Link Advertisements", because they use javascript -which can easily be ignored when calculating link ranking indexes.

The other type of ad is what I term "Organic Text Link Advertisements." These are text link advertisements that are put into a page just as you normally would --without any kind of nofollow attribute or dynamic code. This is how you would link to a site, if you had never heard of Google or any search engine. Just a plain ol', straight link using <a href...></a>... These cannot be easily "ignored" by search engines, and there's been a LOT of controversy over the buying and selling of links and how they affect search rankings.

I -personally- believe Google is causing more problems than they are solving by declaring a "war" on buying and selling text link ads. While I never gave in and sold any text link ads myself (and missed out on nearly $250,000 USD in extra income!), I did have a couple of my sites demoted in the rankings anyway for "assumed" link buying -known as "Google Bowling." It wasn't until I requested re-inclusion that I began to see my traffic come back. Here is an article I wrote entitled, "Who Will Clean Up Google's Mess?"

Since you provided the perfect opportunity to link to the relevant sub-forums for "Organic" versus "SE-Friendly" text links, I have linked the relevant terms above.

And although it might be viewed as a bit of self-promotion, I will put in my two marketplaces in a post in each section that caters to each market. I sometimes let "old-timers" here get away with a little self-promotion, so I guess it's only fair if I do it too -once in a while, when it benefits others to know about a site of mine.

Ciao,

Brandon