elveston priory

As we've covered previously at length, Google has significantly lowered the Page Rank of some sites that sell links to third-parties. Perhaps the company most affected by this policy is Text Link Ads (TLA), whose primary business is allowing web publishers to sell text links to advertisers that are looking to both gain traffic and improve their Page Rank and search positioning. With Google punishing sites that sell ads, TLA stands to lose a good portion of their publisher base.

Today we received a note about a new service TLA will be offering: ShoppingAds. ShoppingAds is a new type of ad that aggregates offers from different shopping comparison sites and allows publishers to link to them with an image and text description. Publishers then get paid when user's click on these ads on a CPC basis (cost per click). This differs from TLA's program for selling links, which allows advertisers to buy text links at a fixed price, usually over a week or month long period.

As for the ads within ShoppingAds itself, they are generated in JavaScript, which the web publisher can then paste into their pages. Thus, there should be no influence on Page Rank when Google indexes a page with a ShoppingAd present. According to the company, these new ads are compliant with AdSense and all other major ad networks.

These new ads are more typical of what you find in most third-party ad networks, and since it appears they are tied with shopping comparison sites and not individual publishers, its unlikely Google will punish those that participate. But, it would appear that TLA is feeling pressure to introduce some new ways for their publishers to make money, since Google has essentially put a big clamp down on their main business model.

Share This