Banner Link from PR7

[davewray]

I have done some research and have found a few sites that offer banner advertising for a very reasonable price and they are PR7 pages that these banners would be shown on. My question is, do banner "links" count as an inbound link to your site? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. Also, do you think that PR7 sites who offer banner ads for $1 per CPM is a good deal? I'd really only be doing this for PR sake, because none of these sites have anything to do with my site, so I'm not sure I'd get much in the way of traffic from them anyways...Another unknown is how many page views these PR7 sites are getting. I may have to pay big amounts of money just to keep my banner ad on their site for the month. The Alexa rating on one of these sites is 10,000. Anyways, any comments would be appreciated, thanks!

Dave.

[jaski]

I have the same beliefs davewray.
I have done a similar thing .. and it did help me go to next PR.

[BlueSky]

What happens after the month when the link no longer counts? Personally, I think it's better to work on longer term solutions. Work on your content and getting links which are more permanent and PR will take care of itself.

[darkroom]

bluesky's suggestion is the best..however don't forget that by buying PR for a couple months, say your PR goes high enough to 6 or 7, you can then make lots of manual links as bluesky suggested....so, now, when you have PR 6 or 7, and you ask for a link exchange, the chances of getting it accepted are much much higher....

[darkroom]

as far as Alexa ranking 10,000 is concerned, i would guess that site is getting a lot of traffic per day...atleast 2000 unique visits....so even if 50% of them clicked on your banner then you'd be paying $1 per day..that is pretty good...i woulnd't mind if you send me their URL.

[rogerd]

Davewray, a few cautions. First, be sure your banner is fixed, not in rotation with a bunch of other banners. (I guess you might get lucky if you were rotating across many high PR pages, but you might miss the spidering, too.)

Second, check the link type - most sites use some kind of ad rotating script, and even if you are the only advertiser in that slot, the link may well be in the form of a script call containing an ad ID instead of a URL. If this is the case, you won't get a PR benefit. The best link is one that is a straight HTML link to your URL. Next best would be a link that calls a script but still contains your URL as a query variable.

They should be able to tell you the number of page views you can expect, so you can estimate your monthly cost.

[Iguana]

My Alexa rating for a site is around 100,000 and I get between 6,000-10,000 unique vistitors per day. So I reckon a rating of 10,000 means a lot more traffic tahn I get

[buckworks]

<<....so even if 50% of them clicked on your banner>>

It would be more realistic to assume a CTR of .05%, not 50%!

[rogerd]

I don't think CTR enters into the issue anyway - it sounds like a CPM ad. But buckworks is right about a CTR below 1% being likely.

[darkroom]

Iguana,
I have a site with Alexa ranking in the 70,000 - 80,000...and it only gets 1000 unique visitors per day....i cant imagine yours getting 10,000 per day with alexa ranking of 100,000

[BlueSky]

I can. Alexa's ranking only considers those who use its own SE which is a very small portion of the overall number using SE's. It would be far more accurate if Google did it.

[davewray]

Thanks for all of your replies. Things I will now do: I will ask the site owner appoximately how many page views I can expect per day. I will also ask whether I will be in rotation with other ads. As well, I will do some research into what rogerd brought up regarding whether my URL will even be visible to googlebot, thus whether PR will be passed on or not. Let's see, $1 per 1000 page views. If .5% click on the ad that would be 5 visitors...hmmmm...I wouldn't be able to cover my costs traffic-wise, but if PR is passed on it would be worth it. Good comment about it being easier to make partnerships with other sites if I do attain a PR6...hadn't thought of that bonus! :) Thanks all.

Dave.

[davewray]

Just as you suspected, rogerd. The site owner emailed me and informed me that he has installed a cgi script and that my URL would not be picked up by googlebot. Dang. There are, however, only four other advertisers that I would be in rotation without. Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on how many impressions he gets per day on the pages in question. I suppose it's cheap enough to give it a try. If my CTR (it is a text ad, not banner) is higher than 0.5% then it may be worth it. By the way, what kind of numbers do you guys have when comparing CTR's between banner and text ads? (This ad would be near the top of the page on the right)

Dave.

[rogerd]

Too bad, it sounded like a great value.

If you pursue the ad purely for clicks, watch your results carefully. For banners, CTRs are all over the map, but I'd be surprised if you even got to .5%, particularly if your ad is not dead-on for the site topic. For a text ad, the position, context, size, and content will make a big difference in CTR - I can't even guess...

It bothers me that the guy seems reluctant to tell you what kind of impressions he'll be delivering.

Have you asked him about a small static text link?

[davewray]

rogerd...no, I have not asked him about a static text link. That may be a good idea! :) It is a "text" banner if you know what I mean. It's just a small box at the top right of the page. However, he rotates these "text boxes" amongst the four different advertisers. So, you think that a 0.5% CTR for a text ad is too high? I would have thought it would be higher than a gaudy banner!

Dave.

[rogerd]

The clicks will depend on the positioning, size, and content. The best kind of text link may be buried in the content so it doesn't even look like an ad.

As far as gaudy banners, the reason you see all those brightly-colored, flashing & shaking banners is because people click on them more frequently than subtle ones. If banners that looked like text ads worked best, that's all you'd see. :) (A few advertisers do use text-looking banners with good success, most notably Google's Adsense.)

[topr8]

>>> Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on how many impressions he gets per day on the pages in question.

hold on, lets backtrack a minute - you are considering advertising with someone who is unwilling to give you an idea of the number of impressions you are going to get a day? personally i'd want them to be more forthcoming.

[davewray]

topr8...He didn't necessarily "withhold" that information about impressions. I asked him that question in an email along with about a half dozen other questions. Could be he forgot to answer the "impressions" question. I'll email him and ask. He's ranked in the top 10,000 at Alexa..quite likely he gets thousands of page views per day....

Dave.

[ogletree]

Alexa means nothing mine is 91,000 and I get only 200 visitors a day. 25% they say is to report.domain.com and that place is IP restricted so I am the only one. I personaly make up 99% of my Alexa rating. Alexa means nothing.

[woop01]

Just FYI,

Alexa = Bull ****

I installed it this spring just to boost my rankings and since I'm on the site all day it got up to ~11,500 when we had 1M page views per month. Now, we get 3M page views per month, I no longer have the toolbar, and we are ranked ~40,000.

I have absolutely no doubt that a large part of the huge shot up WW got this spring on Alexa was due to webmasters who use this site doing the same thing I did. It wasn't a coincidence that Alexa became a hot topic on WW and then WW shot up the rankings on Alexa.

[jaski]

the link may well be in the form of a script call containing an ad ID instead of a URL. If this is the case, you won't get a PR benefit.

I believe it passes PR. The reason I say that is because we got a similar banner link of cgi?id=xx type from a site for only PR and we did go to next PR level after that ..

[rogerd]

Hmmm, interesting, jaski. Are you quite sure it was the cgi script that caused the PR jump? Does it show in your backlinks?

[jaski]

Yes I am very confident rogerd that it caused the PR jump. Yes it shows in the back links.

[davewray]

When I emailed this site owner about advertising on his site and asked if googlebot would be able to spider the link he said, "No, Google will not find your link. The purpose of advertising on our site is not to pass on PR".

He seems pretty confident it does not pass on PR. Could it depend on the type of script you utilise?

Dave.

[ogletree]

If the guy says it does not pass PR and he does not want you to do it for that reason I would take his word on it. He may have alreaday turned you in to Google as a person that is shopping for PR.

[davewray]

Ogletree...Funny thing is in my email to him I didn't mention a thing to him about PR. Just asked if his script contained the URL of the advertiser. He offered up this "information" himself. He can "turn" my site in to Google, but it'll do noone good :) And if he did, Google must have liked my site because it went up in PR ;)

Dave.