What are TLA's?

[kslnor]

I recently read of Text Link Ads...what are they? I didn't spend too much time researching what "they" are, but the little I did learn didn't really help. Any insight from anyone?

[piatkow]

I may be wrong but I understand it as being where links are wrapped around keywords in a page's text that take you to advertisers.

So where you mention "widgets" a link is shown to a site that sells widgets.

It is usually a bit more sophisticated than that with tooltips summarising the ad before you click through but it all looks very tacky in use.

[markwelch]

If you are talking about the automatic insertion of hyperlinks around keywords within an article, be very careful. I've generally found these "paid links" to be irrelevant and quite distracting. This week, I was reading an article and clicked on a link that I thought was going to take me to the merchant who was mentioned in the article, but instead I was redirected to a completely irrelevant site, which had disabled the "back" button so I could not even navigate back to the article. I won't return to that web site!

[kslnor]

Thanks for your reply - both of you. Yeah, that's what I thought they were. I agree, they're pretty anoying. Thanks for the info. re: irrelevant sites.

[ergophobe]

Nope, TLA is first and foremost a company (Text Link Ads is a registered trademark). What they do is broker the sale of text links and several other companies do this. In the case of TLA, these present sort of like Google Ads, but they are even terser and, and this is the key, they do not use javascript to display links, but simple, plain old HTML text.

The idea is that these will count with search engines the same as editorial links (meaning it counts as a vote of confidence and gives you an edge in search results). There have been some noises lately about Google trying to penalize/ignore in various ways sites that buy and sites that display paid links.

Some folks, however, buy text link ads just for traffic because the ROI is good. I have some that I was going to get rid of, but before I did I asked one of the advertisers who buys multiple links from me why he was buying them - for help in the search results or for traffic. He told me that his business depends on 80 sales per year and that in the previous six months, lots of his traffic and two of his sales came from my site (so 5% of the revenue for a 4-person business bought for a pittance). Since the site in question is not really a revenue site and I put the TLAs up for the experiment, I've kept them up there until I can find another way to help the guy out.

[JohnRoy]

ergophobe, I'm not sure Matt Cutts' comments on paid links meant the publisher will be penalized. It's only that the buyer won't get the PageRank he would get from an organic non-paid text link.

[ergophobe]

I was being purposely vague since I didn't know if we wanted to get into that discussion. There is paranoia that sites that publish paid links will be penalized in the search engine results, but what I was thinking of is that your site might be flagged as no longer able to pass "link juice"

So it wouldn't hurt you, at least in the short run, but it might, for example, make it harder for you to use your high-ranking site to get your new site on the radar. I'm not suggesting that it will cause your high-ranking site to be banned or do worse in the search results.