Text Ad Marketing

[meinking22]

Not sure if you guys have beat this horse dead yet or not, but I trolled through past threads and couldn't find a discussion on text ads.

Right now it appears that text ad marketing is en vouge as the quick fix solution for vaulting a website up the SERPs ladder. Ideally, text ad marketing is supposed to be a great source for channeling relevant traffic to a website from an authoritative source. The benefit of a keyword ranking increase, ideally, is supposed to be secondary.

However, I monitor the methods of my competition, as well as many of my peers, and they have embraced text ad marketing as an easy SERP and PR boon. I seem to recall Matt Cutts mentioning something about text ads being okay as long as they are not used for the purpose of SERP manipulation. In SEO and SEM practice, this consideration has clearly fallen by the wayside.

What are your thoughts, if any, on the issue?

Steve

[incrediblehelp]

Buying ads is perfectly fine as you say. If your buying them for the traffic they can deliver from a relevant website.

I personally don't practice it for myself or clients. Even if you buy them for traffic reasons only, they can still influence rankings positions. What happens when you want to stop buying them. Maybe your buying a few hundred per month and this equates to a majority of your backlinks the search engines see. Then you decide to stop buying them. I can tell you what your not going to be happy the following month.

Now if your just buying a few here and there and you already have a large established list of real backlinks, deciding to stop buying the links wont effect your rankings much at all

[meinking22]

As if on cue, Seo-News.com just posted an article today about paid links: Paid Links Quandary

The author, Bill Platt, ends up in the same ballpark that my thinking led me. The issue of paid link usage seems to come down to the "intent" of who paid for the link, and how in the world can Google, or any SE for that matter, determine that?

And even if Matt Cutts quotes the quality guidelines and its “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank" in his blog, how does Google plan to enforce this? I seriously doubt that Google could successfully create an automated system for webmasters and marketers that could do justice to the concept of "intent."

Steve

[ireneherz]

I've got a completely unrelated ad squeezed in at the bottom of my pages, and they've faithfully been paying for it every month, so I guess they see value in it.

Other than that, I think it makes sense to advertise on targeted sites. I mean, isn't that what shop.com is sort of all about?

[achronister]

The issue of paid link usage seems to come down to the "intent" of who paid for the link, and how in the world can Google, or any SE for that matter, determine that?

Google has a vast mountain of data. They can spot footprints of paid link networks and trends that occur with a high percentage of paid links. Obviously they can't determine intent, but it's their engine so they could easily turn down the importance of links that display characteristics of a paid link.

Looking ahead you should try and determine these characteristics yourself and avoid buying links that have these characteristics.