Selling textlinks and Google?

[nfinland]

There is this firm that allows you to sell text links on your site (you paste a code) and you get a small fixed montly fee.

On their site they say you may use the service with AdSense, but there is of course nothing about the business itself. Is this ok with Google? I mean basically Google AdSense is the same - sell afs / text links!

[tedster]

nothing about the business itself

By this, I assume you are wondering if having paid text-links on your site can hurt you in the regular search results. Is that the question?

[Rollo]

Is this ok with Google?

Highly unlikely.

[Kufu]

It is ok with Google if the text link ads that are placed on your site (I am assuming through RSS feeds) have the rel="nofollow" attribute. Google won't penalize you for trying to make money off your traffic, but if the links don’t have the 'nofollow' attribute then the links will be passing PR, and Google doesn't like that, because it artificially boosts the PR of the sites that are advertising.

I am pretty sure that the company that is providing the ads for you will not allow a 'nofollow' tag in the links. :)

Be careful.

[moishe]

I recently bought a text link ad as an experiment to see if it would send me any traffic (page i bought on has PR5 and Alexa under 300). The page my ad is on is chock full of Adsense ads (premium publisher style).

The good folks at Google don't seem to have any problem in this case....

BTW, not a single click through on the text link ad in 2 weeks....

[Kufu]

The good folks at Google don't seem to have any problem in this case....

They don't care if people are just buying ads for traffic. They just discount the PR being passed to the advertiser. The danger arises when someone buys a slew of text-link-ads.