The Battle Between Google and Blogs Selling TLA
Posted on October 30, 2007 - Filed Under Blogosphere News
In case you have been living in the stone age, Google is the search engine that hundreds of millions of people are using to find information, products and services that they need, online. That is information you already know. What about TLA, and how are they associated with blogs? If you own a blog, you should find out quick, or you could be losing a great opportunity to make some money online. If you don’t, you should still find out, because it could present that great business opportunity you have been waiting for.
What is TLA?
TLA, or Text Link Ads, is the business of selling links between advertisers and publishers (or bloggers). At text-link-ads.com, publishers register themselves by providing information on what their blog is about (short description plus keywords) and offering a fixed number of advertising spots in their websites / blogs. Their sites are then reviewed for traffic, popularity of links, theme, and given an Alexa ranking that is visible to advertisers.
At the other end, advertisers use the system to search for a suitable publisher based on requirements like site theme, ranking and budget as well as the placement of the ads. They are also given flexibility to choose specific posts where they want ads to appear in, with the cost of ad space for each particular post. They will typically look to advertise in sites with high traffic volume, so new bloggers with low traffic will not be able to sell TLA spots until they have built a significant amount of traffic to their sites.
Once the ad space is bought, publishers simply need to approve the ads that will appear on their blog, and text-link-ads.com splits the advertising revenue 50/50 with publishers. Its a win-win-win situation for both advertiser and publisher, as well as TLA.com. I have taken a snapshot of the text link ads from John Chow’s site as an example to show how unobtrusive they can be.
Why Does Google Hate TLA?
For one, selling text links messes up the algorithm of their search engine as they do not carry the <nofollow> tag. What this means, is that advertiser sites get a sudden influx of traffic from advertised links that “misleads” the Google search engine into elevating the Page Rank of the advertiser site. The concept is similar to someone who buys large shares of a fund in the stock market to boost its unit price except that while this is illegal, TLA is not.
In retaliation, Google dumped on the Page Rank of the sites selling TLAs, and sites with a Page Rank of 7 dropped to 4th and even 6th positions. For sites that make money off selling ads and text links, this would definitely put a damper on their income but the real victims are advertisers or struggling bloggers who were receiving referrals from these high ranking sites. This has raised quite an uproar among the blogging community, particularly when Google mistakenly pumped down the Page Rank of sites that were not selling any text links but were simply associated with these TLA blogs.
For bloggers like John Chow and Shoemoney who have established themselves as Internet Moguls with a high level of influence and authority over the business of monetizing blogs, their Page Rank status are slowly but surely bouncing back, and their blog subscriptions have increased dramatically as people followed up on the battle between the Google Monopoly and Internet Moguls by reading their posts.
At this point in time, I would say that while the battle continues, bloggers who are making good money off their blog are not overly concerned as people will still return to their blog for the content and advise they provide. While Google may be dumping on their Page Ranking, they have made enough friends in online communities who will support them by linking back to their sites simply because it carries great content.
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2 Responses to “The Battle Between Google and Blogs Selling TLA”
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A low ranking on Alexa does not indicate that the traffic is not being generated on www.google.co.in, www.search.yahoo.com and www.search.msn.com search engines.
Snx for you job!
It has very much helped me!