Link Building Tips from Eric Ward

There are a couple of guys out there who do have link building tips, tricks and ideas that might save your life. One guy, that's been doing this for ages, literally since before Google existed, in fact, since before the Yahoo! Directory existed, is my good friend Eric Ward. We started calling him LinkMoses, because he's just that old. Sorry Eric, it's true.

Here's the thing: Eric is giving away (well, selling, more on that later) tips, in a program he calls "LinkMoses Private". After 16 years of blogging (and I might persuade him to do a guest post here sometime in the future), he's gone for a paid program and if you're serious about link building, I think you should subscribe. The cost? A mere $8 a month.

That, my friends, is hilariously little money. If you get one good link a year out of what he sends you, it'll have been worth it. I've been following for a while now, and he has sent various "Link Opportunity Alerts" that I could use for my clients. Not "general advice" but specific sites to target for specific types of websites. Good solid links, with great instructions on how to get them. These are not paid links, they're awesome link opportunities that don't cost money!

I've subscribed for less than 2 months, because he's been going for less than two months, and already, I've gotten several links out of the link building tips. Now you see why I think all of you, should go and subscribe. I'm not getting paid for this, if I thought his content was bad I wouldn't share it with you. Go, subscribe, NOW!

Link Building Tips that Work is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

How does a link help your site?

A link to your site "helps" in four ways:

• It adds value to the "receiving page", allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.
• It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
• The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.
• People click on links, resulting in so called "direct traffic".

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic.

On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.

So what makes a good link?

Imagine, you're working on a link building campaign for this Link Building 101 post and you get to choose where to place a link and what page to point it at. You'll have to consider the following questions:

• How strong is the site / page that's going to link out?
• Which receiving pages on my site make most sense as far as topic is concerned?
• Which page of this set of sensible pages would deliver the best ROI when it's ranking?
• Which page is most sensible for the visitor of the linking page, clicking on the link?

The last question is often the one best to ask of yourself: link building delivers, if done well, better rankings and more direct traffic. You have to keep in mind though that in most cases those visitors coming to you directly from the other site will behave differently from people coming from the search engines. Say you get a link from a site aimed at elderly women, these people will behave drastically different from the diverse public you'll get from the search engine when the page starts ranking. In your design of the page, you'll have to account for both.

How strong a site and/or a page is, can be judged on several criteria, PageRank being one of them, though often not very accurate. MozRank is useful at times, but the most useful and sensible check often is the following: does the page that you want a link from, rank in the top 20, 30 or even 50 for terms related to the page you'd want it to link to? If the answer to that is yes, a link on that page is usually a good idea.

Link Building 101: The anchor text

If you've decided which page you're going to be linking to, the second question arises: which anchor text will you be using? The anchor text in itself influences two things:

• The anchor text indicates to the search engine what the topic might be of the page the link points at and it can therefor help that receiving page rank for that term. If you want to rank for "WordPress SEO", you'd want to have links to that page with anchor texts like "WordPress SEO", "SEO for WordPress", etc.
• The anchor text also has an effect on how many people will be clicking on the link. While from the above bullet you might have gathered that "click here" is a horrible anchor text, as you probably don't want to rank for it, it does tend to get clicked well and therefor gets you more visitors.

Of course, don't overdo this. If all links, or a too large percentage of links to your site and / or page have the same anchor text, you'll look like a spammer. So if you're actively link building, vary your anchor text.

As you see, these are not trivial decisions, ones you have to make on a site by site and page by page basis. You don't always have the luxury of controlling anchor text and to be honest, that's a good thing; way too much sites out there would have a far over optimized "link profile" if they had such a level of control. Because you have to make these decisions on a site by site basis, buying a "backlink package", something still far too common these days, is often a wrong decision.

Link Building 101: Are there any rules about links?

There are two kinds of rules that influence SEO and thus link building. First of all, there are the rules of the search engines, with Google having said most about links. Then there's the law about advertising, these laws differ per country but especially within the EU they tend to have the same "ring".

What Google says about links and link building

In their article on link schemes Google gives some examples of links that can influence your ranking negatively. This deals with both links to and from your site (f.i.: don't link to spam sites). They're most clear about paid links though: they're a violation of their guidelines and can lead to a ban of your website.

This isn't to say that such links would have an immediate negative effect. In fact, in the short term they might even boost your rankings, as quite often Google has to take manual action to discount those links, as not in all cases Google see whether a link has been paid for or not. But, especially keeping in mind the recent debacles with JC Penney and Overstock.com, both of whom have been penalized by Google and publicly scolded for their behavior by the press, this tactic is seldom worth while.

Google recently published an article on quality links on the Google Webmaster Blog, it's worth reading to get their perspective.

The law about links

I've talked about the Dutch specifics in an article on Marketingfacts recently, which in trun goes back to an article on eConsultancy: if something is an ad, it has to be visibly (for the visitor) marked as such. A paid link could under these new rules be called an ad and would therefor have to be disclosed. I don't see a court case just yet, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Link Building 101: Read More

Outside of this link building 101 a lot is being written about the topic and a large part of it is, excusez le mot, crap. Because of that I'd like to point you at some sources that I do consider worth while:

• Wiep.net
  The blog of my fellow countryman Wiep Knol, an amicable guy and great link builder.
• Eric Ward aka LinkMoses
  When I went to my first class in high school in '94, this guy was already doing link building. His insights are therefor based on a treasure trove of experience.
• LinkSpiel by Debra Mastaler
  She has more of a wider marketing approach to link building and is therefor very usable for each and everyone.

Link Building 101 is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

My buddy Dave (who's colleague posted a very nice review of my WordPress SEO Plugin yesterday btw) tweeted today about 9rules, a once well respected blog network I've tried to get into 2 times:

http://twitter.com/DaveNaylor/status/15720794046857216

I didn't know what he was on about but then Wiep, one of Holland's best link builders, chimed in:

http://twitter.com/wiep/status/15721791548821504

Ok, as you might guess, I was now overly curious as to what was going on. Wiep was kind enough to point it out to me in chat before I had to start search myself. It appears 9rules is openly selling links. It was doing so using a plugin that I've seen more blogs use to sell advertising, called OIO Publisher. The point? The links 9rules sells are not nofollowed.

Now, here's the part where it got really interesting. You see that link where they're selling links? It's an interface of the OIO Publisher plugin. That's what we tend to call a footprint. Let's take some parts of the URL and use them in a nice Google query:

inurl:/oiopub-direct/purchase.php inurl:link

I ran the query and... Ouch... That's a lot of results. Some of them turned out to be sites that were also selling text link ads, but they were nofollowed. Which led me to think it's an option in the plugin. So I asked for a copy of the plugin on Twitter, went through the source and indeed: it is an option. Not just for links, but for the banner ads as well.

Here's where it got really bad too: it has an option to charge a premium to remove the nofollow. Now if you've ever tried to tell Google that you didn't know what you were doing while selling links, checking that box is the best way to make them never ever believe that. And it creates an even nicer footprint:

inurl:/oiopub-direct/purchase.php inurl:link "use nofollow"

All these sites charge you a premium to remove the nofollow tag from your link and deserve to be banned instantly for selling links knowingly.

So, to repeat it: don't sell links without nofollow. If you do, don't be stupid enough to get caught. The example above is a feast for Google. They'll find plenty of link buyers & sellers while researching this footprint.

One more time: Selling links? Don’t be Stupid. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The reason Directory Journal and some other directories can still survive is because they do editorial reviews of sites they list in their directory, and as far as I've been able to tell, they really do a pretty good job of those. If you check out a category like Business Software, you'll see a couple of listings, and when you click one, like the one for Fuel Quest, you'll see that along with the homepage link you get up to 3 deep links you can submit. Now Fuel Quest doesn't rank top notch with those links yet, but they do rank second page on some nice terms when they've only got 2-3 links, one of them being from Directory Journal.

I've investigated some more sites, and it seems that these links do help. After seeing that I dove into why that is true, after all, to be able to give away link equity, a site must have some of it first. If you check out the Majestic SEO report for the site, you'll see they've got an awful lot of nice pages with pretty good backlinks, acquired through multiple methods. They've got some free WordPress themes to download, not one but a couple of very decent blogs with some real quality, unique content and some nice tools for webmasters as well. In all: they've earned their links, and have quite a few of them, which explains why a link from the domain would help in your rankings.

So I think I can honestly say that I think investing the $159.95 for a permanent listing along with 3 deep links is worth it if you need a couple of extra links, and that Directory Journal belongs in the small list of directories that you can still use and feel good about.

DirJournal: a directory still worth submitting to is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I've recently switched back to Safari as my main browser because good ol' Firefox kept crashing on me, and I must say that it's been a smooth experience so far. Safari is a great browser, of course, and 3.1 is very fast as well. One of the things I like to see for every site though is where they use nofollow, so I had to find a way to do that in Safari.

The easiest way of doing that, in my opinion, is using a user stylesheet. You can specify it in your Safari preferences, under Advanced:

(BTW, you can use user style sheets on Firefox too.)

Then put the following in the stylesheet you selected:

a[rel~=nofollow] {
background-color: pink !important;
color: black !important;
font-weight: normal !important;
text-decoration: underline !important;
}

And after that, all nofollow links you encounter should look something like this.

If you want to make sure you see nofollowed image-links as well, add this:

a[rel~=nofollow] img {
border-bottom: 3px solid pink !important;
}

That will add a small pink bottom border to the image that is linked. Download the entire stylesheet here.

User stylesheets to show nofollows is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In the interview that started the whole discussion again, Matt said:

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

This inspired Dan Thies to write his article, which is, in my opinion, both very good and also a bit flawed. Dan says:"That's the key point. Getting more of your important pages indexed." And I simply, do not agree, most of the other stuff is very true and valuable though. Let's get back to the basic theory of how you should create a site structure and theme it correctly: siloing.

Siloing

photo credit: twob

One of the oldest articles I found on siloing is on Bruce Clay's site, in an article from 2005.

The idea (and yes I'm oversimplifying a bit now) is that you only link to pages on your site with the same theme, to make it easier to rank for keywords and keyword groups. A quote:

Siloing resolves this problem by allowing you to achieve high search engine placement both for general and targeted keyword phrases through themed vertical page linking and/or construction.

This article talks about only linking to pages that you really should be linking to. Of course, this is still the best practice, and if you totally lived by that, you wouldn't need to nofollow any links. However if you, for any reason whatsoever (like management that doesn't get it, weird laws / lawyers, or conversion / up-selling reasons), have to link to another, unrelated, page, nofollow is the tool you could use to still abide by those siloing laws.

Nofollow != untrusted

In the beginning of this nofollow discussion, some people I really like and respect, like Greg Boser, Todd Friesen and Dave Naylor, were saying that you should really not use nofollow internally, using the argument: "why would you want to tell search engines that you don't trust certain pages on your site?"

Well, it's not about trust (anymore), as Greg admitted in an interview with Mike McDonald at SES recently, now that Matt has come out and said that. Others are still whining though, in part I think because either they don't get it, or they don't think other people will get it and want people to focus on different things that are more important, like site structure. In part, I agree. PageRank sculpting like that is not something for the faint of heart, or the SEO rookie. It IS however a valuable tool when you actually know what you're doing and have a lot of juice to play around with.

So what is it about then?

As my buddy Michael Gray said: why would Apple want to rank for [contact us]? Doesn't that single ranking imply a wasted opportunity to rank for a few more products they actually sell?

A quote from Matt at DaveN's blog is very important here:

Nofollowing your internals (PageRank sculpting - JdV) can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect.

Anyway, at Onetomarket we've been doing this for at least 4 years. We used javascript links before nofollow was around, and we know that it works because we tested it. It's not specifically about getting more pages indexed, it's about getting those pages indexed that matter to you, and about, as Greg also pointed out in the video interview above, getting as much pages indexed as your overall PageRank can handle. You don't want to "spread yourself too thin".

PageRank sculpting is more then Nofollow

You really need to know that at some point, you'll need more then nofollow. You'll need page per page control of the robots meta tag, and you will probably be using it to noindex, follow category / tag / archive pages, in favor of single pages. That, combined with not giving too much linklove to these pages, is the essence of third level push.

It's also very important to be honest with yourself: "Do I really need this page / this set of pages in the index right now?" It might be wiser to make sure you have a smaller amount of pages in the index, throwing the deeper pages out and allowing yourself to actually rank with the pages higher up in your site's structure.

Those two uses of nofollow, together with the use in siloing of nofollowing links to unrelated pages, make it a very powerful tool. You can be a good SEO without using it, and a lot of times you can probably make more money by focussing on other things, but anyone saying that it's bad advice or nonsense, doesn't know what he or she is talking about, and should think twice before writing openly that people should not follow that advice.

PageRank sculpting – Siloing and more is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

These pages were notorious for selling links and creating very weird link profiles for loads of Dutch pages, and luckily enough, these clones have recently been dropping hard in the rankings. Not the original startpagina.nl though, which is still a source of a lot of traffic, traffic that often converts very well. As such, people are very willing to pay for links on these pages, and in my opinion loads of companies should be buying those links.

The problem is that the company which sells a lot of those links wrote an article on MarketingFacts today, one of Holland's biggest marketing blogs, highlighting the traffic and conversions these links provide, but also highlighting the search ranking aspects of these links. I'll try to literally translate the sentence I took beef with: "Google sees paid text links as spam, unless (bolding mine) they're placed in a relevant context."

Now my personal opinion on this doesn't really matter, but by putting it like this, in my opinion they claim to have gotten some sort of "ok" from Google, or know that they're doing the right thing. Now of all I've seen in the discussion around paid links over the last months, my conclusion is that Google does not look at it that way, and instead just thinks that all paid links should be marked as such with a nofollow link, whether or not they're relevant doesn't matter.

Because the debate about this can go on forever in Dutch, since there's no one from Google to chime in, I've made the above post, and hope that allows for feedback from Google. I also hope that if I'm drawing things out of context or putting them wrongly, the Dutch people who followed or joined in the discussion at MarketingFacts will correct me.

Update: while checking out the site of AdLantic, the company selling those links, I found this:

AdLantic adverteert uitsluitend op thematische linkoverzichten met een hoge pagerank. De linkoverzichten hebben meestal 1 specifiek onderwerp (bijvoorbeeld: hypotheken, vakantie, dating, computer, etc), waardoor ze bij Google een zeer hoge relevantie hebben.

In English: "AdLantic advertises solely on thematic linkpages with a high PageRank. The link pages usually have one specific subject (f.i.: mortgages, travel, dating, computers, etc.) which makes sure they have a very high relevance in Google."

I'd like to say: case closed.

A Dutch discussion on paid links is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I've been thinking of a plugin to do cooler stuff with commenters for a while, and I'll move it up my list a bit. I actually want to be able to give those of you whom I trust and who contribute to this blog to be able to have follow links.So what I'm thinking of, partly inspired by Jeremy, is a way to give people profiles on this blog, much like SEOmoz has. I want to allow those profiles to have straight links, but only after I chose to give that person the right to create such a profile...

Might be a bit of work, so don't expect this to be finished tomorrow ;)

Putting nofollow back on links in comments is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

He's always been risking this, and he'll take the punishment with a smile, respecting his "enemy" for his cleverness in finding him.

Now imagine a second client, who's bought links all across the globe, with only one single purpose: increasing his PageRank. At one point in time, some 4 years ago, an SEO told him that's what he should be doing and he hasn't changed his tactic since, unaware of the search world, and the changing ethics within it, and thus unaware of the fact that he's doing something wrong.

If the first one decided to do a reconsideration request, and Google decides to let him wait for a while before they reinclude him, that sounds fair, right? But if the second one finally finds out what went wrong, and decides to do a reconsideration request, they shouldn't make him wait too long, right? Or is it perhaps not so simple?

Now you'll hear people say that it all boils down to one thing: intent.

Bullshit.

They both did what they did with the intent of increasing their search engine rankings and traffic, knowing full well, that what they did was game the search engines. The important thing here is whether they knew that they were breaking rules or not and how Google treats that. After all, under most governments, breaking a law that you didn't know about is still breaking a law (ignorantia juris non excusat).

The other important thing to know is: did they do the buying before or after Google had said that buying links to increase your PageRank was wrong, and how does Google treat that. In a lot of countries only very specific laws can be applied to you if you did something to break them before the law was invented (ex post facto laws).

All this then boils down to: what is Google's reason for punishing anyone? Well, they're probably the same reasons as sanctions are used within criminal law: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and restitution. The question is though whether retribution is any good in this case, as most people will never openly tell that they've got this problem...

While Michael Gray was very right in saying that Google is not the government, they do have the right to "do as they please" within their own search engine. If Google were a government though, you'd probably have a court of some sorts, deciding on how to deal with issues like this and creating openly available jurisprudence in the process.

Now that's what we're missing here, and that's what makes decisions on whether to reinclude people or not and how long you will "punish" them, seem arbitrary. So what we need is openness, jurisprudence to go by, and a judge. Basically, what we need is a Google court!

We need a Google court! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Buying links or traffic?
We had an interesting discussion on paid links, and whether we'd buy links or not to start a site. Dixon said he looked at it as buying traffic, not pagerank, which is probably a smart way of looking at it.

What to do with affiliate links
Either cloak them, or use a redirect script on your site, which you're blocking for bots through robots.txt. To be absolutely certain, make sure that if an SE bot opens that script anyway, it redirects into your own site and not to the merchant.

Hosting
If you want to rank in the UK (or in Germany or Spain for that matter) host the pages you want to rank within the country you're aiming for. Just a .co.uk isn't good enough, you have to host it in the UK as well.

"I got some bad links and my site's rankings went down"
This was an interesting question from someone from the public, who said his rankings went down after getting links from some trade organizations. We were all highly doubting that that was his problem, until I found a link directory hiding on his site, which had nothing to do with the subject of the rest of his site. That directory went up round about the same time as he got those links. We advised him to remove that immediatly.

Session ID´s
We had some questions about sessionid's and of course we all agreed: get rid of those, and 301 redirect those indexed out.

Starting with a freshly registered domain
The three other guys where quite open about this: don't. Buy an old site, and use it, or 301 redirect it into your new domain.

I probably forgot quite a bit, but as you can see we touched on loads of stuff, and it was really loads of fun.

Extreme SEO Q&A is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So I removed all those, and requested reconsideration through the webmaster console, after e-mailing with Brian White, and as you can see, my toolbar PageRank is now back to a healthy PR6. Now to be honest I don't really care about toolbar PR, and you shouldn't either, because it didn't affect my rankings in any way whatsoever. However: clients do look at it, and getting clients to stop looking at it is pretty damn hard...

So if you got penalized, and think that's unfair or otherwise have reason to believe you don't deserve the penalty (anymore), just request reconsideration!

I requested reconsideration, and got my PageRank back! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Another Dutch SEO wrote a week ago that Google "can't algorithmically detect paid links" (translation mine). Well, if you agree with him, I beg you to reconsider that. If you had 200 links on day 1 with all sorts of anchor text, and you went out and bought yourself 500 links with only 3 different anchor texts, you don't think Google (or any other search engine) can detect that? Then I'm very glad you're not doing my link building. (And I'm not even talking about the horrible code patterns some of these guys have, you can recognize an awful lot of TLA "blogroll" lists without any trouble if you know how their WordPress plugin works.)

You have to remember, that Google doesn't only have the current snapshot of your domain and it's links, it has the entire history. Your link building profile is coming along with your domain for the rest of it's existence. Eric Ward talked about that on SearchEngineLand back in April, and we've had quite a few new clients at Onetomarket over the last year with the same problem: a link profile full of spammy links. And believe me: a spammy link profile is not something easily fixed.

Back to your natural link profile: it's natural for me to have a lot of links with the anchor text "Joost de Valk", "yoast.com", or even "Joost de Valk's SEO Blog". It would not be natural for me to have twice as much links with just "SEO Blog" as with "Joost de Valk". That would raise flags. So using "click here" as an anchor text every once in a while might be a great idea. It's not "wasted anchor text", it's just a natural addition to your natural link profile. And if you're smart, you'll use it in places where you actually want people to click, because, as Brian pointed out, people work that way. Want to test it?

Click here to get my WordPress Google Analytics plugin, and it will automatically tag all your outbound links in posts.

Click here to read all about a natural link profile is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Nofollow was meant to combat comment spam. It failed miserably at that, but it was designed with the intent of preventing link-juice flowing to links that had not been editorially reviewed, and thus prevent you from linking to spammy sites. If people start using them within blogposts, where's the end? SEO wise, there's no use. You're linking to content relevant to the topic at hand, thus increasing the value of the post for both the search engine and the user. So please, don't use nofollow for editorially reviewed links. Ever.

Update: Markus has replied in the comments and has removed the nofollow, kudos to you pal!

nofollow is NOT meant for editorially reviewed links is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In my opinion, this is great news, as it will reduce the amount of spam in WikiPedia a lot, all though people will still be spamming it for the traffic it get's.

[tags]wikipedia, linkbuidling, seo, link building, nofollow[/tags]

Outbound links in english WikiPedia now nofollowed as well is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I was asked to review Text Link Ads (aff) on ReviewMe. I've been using Text-Link-Ads as a publisher for quite a while now, so I have quite a few things to say about it, both positive and negative.

Interface wise, TLA rocks. It has a very intuitive interface, and I've been able to find my way around quite easily most of the time. There are some issues though: when you're editing your listings, it's not obvious which listings are really listed, unless you know what the difference is. As it turns out, if your site is listed, it will give a screenshot of your site when editing your listings, and a text: "your site is currently available at: link". It won't give you any info like this when your site is not listed though, which caused me to find out a few of my sites weren't listed a few weeks to late...

Their support is great; I've had a couple of issues were things weren't showing up the way they were supposed to, and every time I've contacted support about such an issue, they got back to me within 1 or 2 days and had fixed the problem.

Payments are also arranged nicely, you get paid after links have been up for a month or part of a month, and the payment is usually in within 3 days after the end of the month. During the month you can see a nice overview of what you've earned so far, and every time they've sold a link on one of your websites they will e-mail you. (That has become one of my favourite e-mails :) )

Installing the ad code is pretty easy when you have a supported blog platform, the WordPress plugin worked perfectly for me. It would be good though if you could change the color etc of your links in a page in your WordPress admin instead of their interface. I use the PHP code on some sites as well, and that has worked perfectly as well, though it's a bit harder to implement.

Their feedvertising stuff is cool as well, but I haven't given that a proper try either yet. What I did see in my quick try of it was that it's easy to use, as are all their products. It allows you to show personal ads under your RSS feeds, which might be very useful for cross promoting your sites.
I've honestly never made money off of their affiliate program yet, but I haven't been trying hard either, I might give that a try some more in the coming months. I can say that getting links and banners etc. for that is quite easy.

Review of Text-Link-Ads.com is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

[tags]w3c, google, matt cutts[/tags]

W3C paid links no longer indexed is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!