I Said No To Text-Link-Ads

By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News Network
Thursday, July 5, 2007

When I signed up for text-link-ads several months earlier, I meticulously read the terms and conditions. Nowhere was it mentioned that you couldn’t use nofollow on your links. As such I had signed up with text-link-ads and have used nofollow from the very beginning. I used to make under 400$ monthly. Few days back I got a very interesting email from Brock Boser, Inventory manager of text-link-ads.

Angsuman,

It is against our terms and conditions to have a rel=”nofollow” on the TLA ads. Could you please remove this? Please let me know once this is done and so we can send you payment for your links. Until then I have put your account on HOLD.

Brock Boser
Inventory Manager
Text-Link-Ads
a MediaWhiz Holdings, Inc. Company

I replied to him with:

Hi Brock,

When I signed up for text-link-ads I carefully noted the terms and conditions and I couldn’t find any condition anywhere which explicitly prohibited me from using nofollow on my links. Have the terms and conditions recently changed?

I am just following the Google Webmaster guidelines for sponsored links. Can you please clarify your position?

Best,
Angsuman

He replied back:

Angsuman,

We sell our ads as direct links void of any “no follow” tags so that is what our advertisers expect and are paying for. Unfortunately since we did not hear from you for over a week our clients started requesting to be removed. I believe we owe you around $200 for the ads for the first three weeks of the month. Please let me know if this will work and we will clear the hold and process the payment to you.

Thanks,

——————

Brock Boser

Inventory Manager

Text-Link-Ads

a MediaWhiz Holdings, Inc. Company

I decided I couldn’t go along with text-link-ads under their revised terms as he put forward. So I decided to withdraw from text-link-ads. I replied him:

Hi Brock,

When I signed up I was clear from your terms and conditions that there is no restriction on using nofollow which is why I signed up.
It is not possible for me to remove the nofollow. So I have decided not to use Text-Link-Ads anymore.
I leave it to your conscience at to whether you want to pay me the money you owe on account of the ads displayed.

Best,
Angsuman

Update: I did receive a payment from TLA today. So they played fair.

In conclusion I have decided to withdraw from text-link-ads and also removed their links from this blog. I will remove the few other links by tomorrow. At the core I want to play fair. I am not against link ads. They are a valid and proven advertising concept. However I think they should either be in javascript or with nofollow. What would you have done in my position? What are your thoughts on text-link-ads business model?

Discussion
July 28, 2010: 8:32 am

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

March 25, 2010: 2:24 am

Well that’s stupid I think. TLA pays well and pays the most on my sites. The nofollow rule is trivial and not giving up that money for, just to satisfy google PR. To heck with google. It’s their problem. So what if your page rank goes down a bit?

March 3, 2010: 11:29 pm

All people deserve wealthy life time and loan or just car loan can make it much better. Because freedom depends on money.

January 11, 2010: 12:41 am

Very nice post. Thanks for clearing idea about TLA terms.. I have also terminated TLA account which was using for my blog…


Urban Duque
December 6, 2009: 9:54 am

The whole purpose of an advertiser purchasing a link ad is so that Google, etc. will pass PR and backlinks. Setting a nofollow will defeat both although PR is of no value nowadays. Setting a nofollow will cause the link to be nothing but a static link “hopefully” to be clicked on by an interested party.

April 7, 2009: 2:23 am

Personally I think if Google or some other search engine doesn’t like paid links then they should overlook them and move on if they suspect that they were paid. It would also be just as simple for them to look for a special HTML comment to identify the paid links so they are not counted by the search engine. Anything outside of this is just the search engine trying to bully you into submission and possibly the use of their own ad services which I refuse to use Adsense since they have zeroed our balance out on a number of occasions claiming click fraud. Awful funny that there was no issue and this has only happened every single time we have reached the payout amount. Also find it awful funny that in their response to our emails to them they admit that it was their system that screwed things up yet they are going to keep our money anyway.

I sell links on my websites to help pay the costs of hosting and maintaining the websites. I do not make a fortune off of them. If I do not sell the ads then I must charge my users to use the site which they are less likely to continue coming to the sites if they have to pay to use them.

I only sell links that are specific in category to what my sites are about. Still Google has dropped my PR4-5 website to PR 0 because of this. They are penalizing us for their own inequities.

I say to heck with Google. Now that they have used all of us to get so big they don’t care about us any more. Well I am back to using Yahoo, MSN, Live or any other that is NOT Google.

January 22, 2009: 3:33 pm

what a long article. I tired when I read this post. But your article had been effective. Thanks so much for this post

August 2, 2008: 12:54 am

We use text link ads on our websites. We are not dishonest about them being sponsored as they are. We do not use nofollow although that should not make a difference either way to an advertiser. Most ads are in place for a month. Not long enough to make a difference in any page rank as it is likely the link will not be there the next time the page is crawled. The purpose of buying the link in the first place may not be for the page rank as that would make very little sense. Rather it is to drive traffic to your website. That is all and a nofollow in place makes no difference for that. Just the same if it violates the TLA TOS then don’t do it or don’t use them. Pretty simple. They fetch you top dollar for your links though so why complain. As for altering their ad code… We have done this as well. We had to due to the default code breaking our layout. We contacted TLA and submitted our changes to them. They have not had an issue with this at all. Key point being “we contacted them in regard to the changes” The way I view TLA is that they find links relative to my websites content that in turn give my users something of relevance to look at and they saved me the time of having to scour the internet to find those that are actually interested in a link on our site. The payment is for the real estate that the links consume and that is all. If google does not like that we offer these links than that is just to bad for google. We do not base our actions on what google thinks as they are nothing to us other than a small percentage of our traffic. If they don’t like it we do not care. They can crawl elsewhere. If more people took on our attitude google’s pull in these areas would diminish. Take back control of the internet and take it out of the hands of corporate conglomerates such as google.


Andreas
January 1, 2008: 12:18 pm

Thanks for this post, it was very useful! I\’ve had a successful co-operation with TLA, making up to $900 during the peak months, and they have always been fair to me. But when I asked about adding rel=\”nofollow\” and about risks with sponsored links without the nofollow added, I was told to just be smart and not write out that the links were sponsored. That wouldn\’t be honest, and I wouldn\’t want to be seen as dishonest even by Google. I have now removed my TLA links (directly after the payment for december came), and will not put them back until the rel=\”nofollow\” is in place. Until then, I will manage all advertisements on my site all by myself to make sure it is done in a way that keeps everyone happy.


Angsuman Chakraborty
December 11, 2007: 12:16 am

Brandon,

1. When text-link-ads first launched and I signed up this clause wasn’t in the contract.

2. When I signed up, text-link-ads allowed you to customize the links based on an API example they provided. They encouraged customization. I used it to add nofollow links, fully following their guidelines.

Hope that clairifies,
Angsuman

December 10, 2007: 6:47 pm

Sorry, quote didn’t work:

https://www.text-link-ads.com/agreement.php

section 9a: The publisher is not permitted to alter the ad script provided by the Company in any way without written consent from Text Link Ads while delivering the advertisements.

December 10, 2007: 6:36 pm

Section 9a says, \

November 27, 2007: 10:19 am

You are very good negotiating with them.
Congrats on your payment.
Before this I am using blogspot to blog. I got PR2 and then I just start my own blog. Do visit me back and help me with blogging. Thanx Angsuman

November 27, 2007: 10:13 am

You are very great at negotiating with them.
Finally managed to get your payment.
Good job Angsuman.

November 11, 2007: 8:54 am

Hey Angsuman,

How did you change their output code and add the nofollow ? did you hardcode the links ?

October 3, 2007: 12:20 pm

Welcome to the club :)

October 2, 2007: 5:45 pm

Just got a similar email from Brock. Moreover he also asked me to change the heading “Sponsored Links” to something like “Friends”.

Guess what have I replied?

Except to be fair to the advertisers I asked them not to pay me so the money can be refunded. Again, I’ll leave it to their conscience whether they actually refund the money :)

September 30, 2007: 5:09 am

Thanks for the post. Nice to see people giving away money for the good of search quality. I am interested in such a service, selling my space but no faking a link. Is there any good alternative?

August 9, 2007: 1:11 pm

When it comes down to it, ads in Javascript are called AdSense using AdWords, not text links.

They are completely separate industries and should be treated as such.

July 25, 2007: 5:13 pm

Bravo. I almost did the same thing. I still can’t find anything on their site about rel="nofollow". I’d have Text-Link-Ads on my site in a second if they could be “nofollowed.” Of course, I knew their angle and what the end game would be. Still, I’m glad someone challenged them on it.

July 8, 2007: 8:43 pm

This is interesting…I guess no one ever gave it a second thought. It’s simply assumed that links - paid or unpaid - on the sidebar especially are automatically “follow”.

From an advertiser’s viewpoint, why would they want to pay for a link that is “nofollow”?

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