Vancouver
Joined:
28 Dec 2004
Posts:
136
Location:
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
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Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 4:45 am
Post subject: DigitalPoint's Ad Network--Legitimate Power Linking or Spam?
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I posted the following to my blog and thought folks here may be interested in Shawn Hogan's ad network as a way to achieve automated reciprocal linking:
Shawn Hogan of DigitalPoint.com has created a bit of a ruckus with his co-op advertising network. The purpose of the network is to utilize "unused advertising space available on the web." Here's how it works: you put a bit of code on each page of your site and it serves up text (or graphic) ads that change each time the page is loaded. This is kind of like Google Adsense except there is no correlation between what your page topic is and what ads are served up.
Although dynamically generated, these text ad links can be crawled by the search engine spiders. Participation in the network is free and what you get out of it depends on what you give into it. If you display 5 ads per page and you have 100 pages in the Google index, then you are given a weight of, say, 500 (5 x 100). The higher your "weight", the more often your ads will show on other sites in the network. In order to be an eligible page, the page has to be indexed. The co-op ad network checks this using Google's API.
So what's with all the grumblings? The network's critics contend that because the links are crawlable and the ads may be irrelevant to the page's topic area, this is akin to having some sort of link farm or scheme designed to influence page ranking. Indeed, Shawn's own site, DigitalPoint, showed up for a while at No. 4 for the term, "eBay" purely because he designed his ads so that the anchor texts had the word "eBay" in them. Carried across hundreds of participants in the network, it had automated the reciprocal-linking process.
But, you would think that this is a bad thing from Google's perspective, right? Not quite. GoogleGuy responded to a thread at Threadwatch.org on this topic. GG said he was concerned about linking out to "bad neighborhood" participants in the network (like some Polish site that was apparently cloaking the co-op ads). GG didn't say that the network was bad because it manipulated rankings, he said the worry was "bad neighborhoods." So, does that mean that if the bad neighborhood problem was under control then the co-op network is sanctioned? Maybe...
Here's how I look at this network: what if Google didn't exist? What if no search engine existed? What would I do to advertise my site? I'd have to do reciprocal linking. But reciprocal linking willy-nilly wouldn't cut it; it'd have to be targeted, topic-based. I would do reciprocal linking with other like sites. Would I participate in this network if there were no search engines? Absolutely! It would greatly ease my reciprocal linking time. But the network is untargeted as it is currently configured--something Shawn's going to have to work on, IMO.
In conclusion, the network is a great idea. Google shouldn't have issues with it, in concept. But concept is not reality. In reality, people are joining and trading "weight" to influence ranking in the search engines. It's not a perfect solution. Is it spamming the search engines? I don't think so because the search engines haven't clearly defined exactly everything that is or isn't a spamming technique. But I appreciate others may have a different interpretation.
You can go to Shawn's Ad Network page from the link in my sig.
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dcristo
Joined:
23 Jun 2004
Posts:
471
Location:
Sydney, Australia
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Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2005 5:28 am
Post subject:
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| I agree with you Vancouver. I think it's a completely legitimate ad network. There is the issue of linking out to bad neighbourhoods, but with the human reviewed site policy this shouldn't be a huge concern. Definately the theming of links will have to be addressed. |
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