Selling links on your website or blog

Selling links on your blog or website is strictly prohibited by the search engines and usually you get penalized if you don’t no-follow these links. That’s not a simple advice from the search engines, saying “You shouldn’t do it”, it’s a clear and simple rule which must be obeyed. Or you get yourself penalized and possibly removed from the search engines.
So, why are search engines so strict about link-exchanges? Because links are the base of the web and by selling these links webmasters poison the web. If links are sold on a website, those links will be adverts, thus the users have to know that the link they will follow it will land them on an advertiser’s page. The fact that every advertisement has to be clear to the consumers that it is an advert is stated in the European Community’s, the USA FTC’s and many other countries’ trade laws.
A user clicks on a link because thinks it will be useful for him. If you provide on your website links which are irrelevant to your content, you basically fool your users.
So how can you both sell links on your website and remain a good-guy? The search engines say that you should no-follow each link you put on your website and you don’t want to pass your reputation to. Like a payed link. The no-follow relation usually scares away the potential advertisers, but it shouldn’t really. They buy space on your page because they want traffic, if they don’t accept the no-follow tag, it means that they also wanted a piece of your Page Rank. And this is not really good.
Also, it’s up to you that you disclose that the link is a sponsored link or not. The ethics (and the trade rules) dictates that you should disclose, but since non-commercial websites and blogs aren’t governed by the trade rules and the ethics can also be put in the background in certain circumstances, again, it’s up to you what you do.
The no-follow tag has to be in place for every sponsored link, that’s the rule.

Sponsored reviews on your website or blog

That’s an odd situation, again. Starting from the “Everybody loves money” statement, one of the easiest way to get (almost) instant money is to write a 200-400 word long sponsored review on your blog. The problem appears when an advertiser requests from you to neither disclose that the article is a sponsored review, nor allow you to assign no-follow relation to the link which will point to the sponsor’s page. Excuse me, but as far as I my knowledge is OK, the advertiser wants to sell a product for example, not to increase its page rank by sucking a piece of your own rank.
The rules of the above mentioned linking rules should be followed in the sponsored reviews’ case, too. If you don’t apply the no-follow relation on the outgoing links from within the review, you will have issues with the search engines. That’s sure. Other than that, a sponsored review is advertisement, so your visitors should know that you wrote that article because you were hired to do so, not because you really — for example — recommend a service or product for them. But this depends on your ethics; if you’re an non-commercial website’s or blog’s author, you are not governed by any governmental trade law, of course, as far as I know.

My final thoughts are that webmsaters shouldn’t fool their visitors, and this applies to the ads and posts, too. Our websites are sponsored by the visitors, both directly and indirectly. If we fool them, we loose their confidence and they’ll never return. The worse case, when they start to spread that they were fooled by you.

First, let’s point out some basic things in Internet Advertising. Who is the publisher and who is the advertiser? The publisher is me. I publish ads on the top and in the navigation sidebar of my website. Both ad blocks are paying only if a user interacts with them, so if you click (DON’T DO IT NOW) one of those ads I get some money. But don’t think my pocket will be full in no time! No. These ads usually pays very small amount. My experience is that the advertisers set a very low price for one very obvious reason: they want to pay as little as possible and earn as much visitor as possible. So the advertisers are who created those ads. If you click on an ad, you will be taken to the advertiser’s website and the publisher receives the commission for the referral.

Now let’s see the advertisement types. There are three I will mention now: CPM, CPA and CPC. Don’t be scared, I explain each below.

If the ads are CPM based ads, they keep the site rolling OK. The user doesn’t have to interact with the advertisement to generate some tiny revenue for the website when talking about CPM ads, so these are the most convenient ones if a website has many thousands of visitors. CPM ads are usually so called ‘branding’ ads and they are used to, well, to brand. Again usually, these are image ads not text ads. For example, the below ad SHOULD be a CPM ad coming from Google AdSense. Since the publishers have no great control over whom ads are displayed, theoretically on each page load this should show a new ad and Google decides what type of ad and which advertiser’s. If there is no CPM ad available for the context of this post, it will show a CPC ad. If no CPC ad is available, it will show a … nothing.

There are two other type of ads I mentioned above: CPC and CPA. Well, there are more, but for example I consider pop-unders and pop-ups an extremely annoying and idiotic thing, not an advertisement. So, the CPC ads are Cost per Click ads. This means that the advertiser who created that ad pays for the publisher only if a user actually clicks that small ad. And only then. An example for the CPC ad is shown below. These are usually text based ads. The greatest CPM and CPC advertisement networks are Google AdSense and Adbrite. I feel that Adbrite pays a bit better than AdSense but it pays only with checks which I don’t really like. AdSense offers Western Union electronic transfer to pay the publishers (in a few countries) which is extremely convenient for me. Also, AdBrite’s engine shows more CPM ad, which on a high traffic website is an extremely good thing.

On the other hand, CPA or Cost per Action/Acquisition pays even harsher case: the user who clicked the ad has to do something on the advertisers website. The advertisement from the very top of this page, actually all of the pages on this website, are CPA ads. The greatest CPA ad networks are DoubleClick and CommissionJunction.

So, as a last word. I know that the common users already formed a so called “ad blindness” which typically means that they simply don’t see the ads, but sometimes, especially if you like the website, you should try to forget about that blindness