RWT Webmaster Tools Blog

Text link ads are for advertising

There is a debate amongst the web community about the nature and purpose of text links ads.

I offer my the following as my humble (and novice) opinion:

Text link ads are, as stated in the name, ads. It is all about advertising. This is, and should be, the primary function of text link ads. Some websites are advertisers; they place ads on other sites. Other websites provide adspace; they accept advertisers. It is really that simple. It is a market exchange of information.

As an advertising medium, text link ads are not the flashiest. They are nothing but simple text. However, it is this simplicity which makes them user and customer friendly. Part of the debate revolves around this issue of customer friendliness. The web is full of obnoxious (and customer unfriendly) advertising such as pop up ads and flashy banner ads. I define customer friendly as any means of advertising which does not take away from the customer experience. Clearly, we all want advertising to have a good ROI. However, I think reputation and customer friendliness have to be a factor as well. Being flashy and “in your face” does seem to have its rewards. However, building a long term relationship with your customer/reader/user demands that you respect them. The “in you face user car salesmen” approach does not build long term relationships.

As an advertiser, text link ads are a great way to place key ads on key sites. It can get expensive. More on that later. As an adspace seller, text link ads are a great way to earn money from your site.

Secondarily, text link ads can be used as a means of linkbuilding. There are many caveats here. Because of the sheer number of caveats is why I consider linkbuilding as a secondary use of text link ads.

Text link ads can get a website noticed and crawled. Have a new site? Spend the money to place ONE text link ad on a popular site. Your website will get crawled fairly quickly. Keep the text link ad in place for several months and your site will also benefit from that popular site’s visitors.

It is not feasible for new sites to develop a full fledged linkbuilding program, unless of course they have deep pockets or access to a lot of start up money. It is just too expensive to do all at once. The new site CAN start small and grow slowly. There is much to be said for the start small and grow slowly approach. Namely, it saves money, allows for mistakes, and helps you learn.

Those large sites who use text link ads as the sole means of linkbuilding maybe facing a dim future. Search engines such as Google are beginning to recognize which link are text links ads. They are devaluing such links within their link popularity algorithms.

There are two resources that I recommend for learning more about text link ads. First, Text Link Ads has an excellent resource on how to use text link ads for link building. Second, Linkworth has numerous articles about text link ads. Both are resources are worth reading.