Advice On Difference Text Links / Images links

Banners are they safer?

[flanok]

I have an existing website. I have just taken over another related site with excellent rankings and 1000,s page delivering 10,000 visitors a day, < but it doesn't offer the specific service that my exisitng site does >.

It makes commercial sense to link from each page of my new site to my existing site.

But I am concerned about too many links going to this site and this process being seen as spam, so I have decided it cannot be text links and harm the rankings of my existing insurance site.

So my question is
If I use a banner/image, with no alt text from each page instead of text, will this be penalised? This will mean 1000,s of indentical going to my insurance site in one day.

Does Google accept the use of image links or banners as a normal commercial opperation or spam?

After all many large sites, including search enigine sell banners as commercial space and place these also over 1000s pages.

I have also noticed that the insurance site at number one has thousands of banner links also from another website. About 10 images per page over 1000,s of pages from a car selling website.
These are all noticable from the link command of this competitor.

On the face of it, it looks like an acceptable practice, but would like some more opinions.

many thanks

Mark

[edited by: tedster at 11:17 pm (utc) on Aug. 30, 2007]

[tedster]

If you want to place those links purely for the commercial value of the clickthrough traffic, I'd say design the links however seems most effective for that purpose - text or images - and include a rel="nofollow" attribute in the anchor tag.

[flanok]

Hi,
thanks for that.
I had considered that as an option.

And if that is the only solution, that is what I will do.

I know I will ot gain any text link benefit, but I would gain more PR.

But what I really want to know is
has anyone else added many banners at one time and it being ok or will it be treated as spam?

Mark

[tedster]

I've added run-of-site links to a related domain, same owner. I've added them in the navigation area and I can't say I ever saw trouble from it, but this was only on 1,500 pages.

Another approach occurs to me - you might also create a "pre-sell" page on the newly purchased domain, but make it look like the old domain. That way, all the thousands of banners would point to a url on the same domain - and that pre-sell content would hold the only "real" links to your older domain.

Or you could just try the banner ad, and if a ranking problem results, just remove it and submit a reconsideration request. A bit nerve-wracking not to feel certain on this, I can understand, but certainty can be hard to come by.

[flanok]

After doing this I imedialty got improved results.

But yesterday my external link count in sitemaps increased from 1270 to 4030.

Today i have lost one main 2 word key phrase totaly from the index and dropped considerably on other 2 word phases.

Strangely enough, the 3 word phrases have just nudged down a bit.

This all could be normal Google processes and if i wait it could be back to normal.
But I felt uncomfortable right from the start doing this.
So for now I will add a banner to the blog section only which has 440 internal pages listed, in the hope to measure any swing.

Then I will consider no follow tags on the images if i add them to the main site part

Mark