As many of you progress through the internet business building systems within Information Marketer’sZone you quickly begin to realize that you have substantial website real estate that can not only be monetized through selling your own information products, affiliate marketing revenues – but also through advertising.
Once you begin to generate some decent traffic – even as little as 100 unique visitors a day in some markets – you will be contacted and have the opportunity to sell space on your blog or website where you will either place text ads, javascript code (as Google Adsense gives you when you signup for their network), image-linked ads right up to full banners.
Should you offer ad links on your website?
What does Google think of selling your ad space to 3rd party advertisers – where it is not Google Adsense – for instance?
The main concern here is that Google frowns upon selling space on your website for the purpose of generating pagerank or linkjuice.
So – if someone wants to pay you to get in front of the visitors you have coming to your site for the sole purpose of getting those visitors to click on their links, then that is fine.
What Google doesn’t want to see is text links (or now javascript ads as you will see in the Matt Cutts video below) that are sold based on your site being a PR3, 4 or 5 site to transfer some of that pagerank through to your advertiser.
How do you get around this?
Google suggests that you mark all text (and perhaps now javascript) ads you place on your site as “No Follow” typically done through a robots text command so that you tell Google that these are paid ads where you don’t want to be penalized for passing link juice or impact search engines based on paid ads.
Here is the video from Google researcher Matt Cutts that explains further:
So, what seems to be happening here is the following:
1. Over time, google has gotten better at identifying paid ads in text-link format and penalized sites that do not include a No Follow on those paid ad links
2. Google is getting better at crawling javascript code and passing link juice through javascript links – but to do so, they do not want to open up a new weakness of exploiting search engine page rank techniques that obfuscate themselves as javascript links instead of plain text links. So, they are getting better at not not only crawling javascript, but at penalizing sites that use javacscript as paid ads to pass search engine advantage to their advertisers. The answer again here is to use the No Follow tag in your javascript. How diligently you do this and when (and how hard) Google will begin to penalize is yet to be determined
The message is fairly clear – if you operate a directory on any page within your site (or as the main function of your site) and you do so through either unpaid or paid links, pay attention to how well you No Follow those links to preserve the integrity of your other links where you DO want Google to follow, index, rank and pass pagerank (such as internal links or links between your sites where there is relevancy).
What are your thoughts on Google’s latest moves to better crawl and control search engine impact on javascript links?
Jeff
