All you’re concerned about is being able to pay your bills at the end of the month. You’re not one of those lucky few bringing in enough via adsense alone. Far from it, it’s taking you 2 - 3 months to accumulate the $100 minimum Google requires before they issue a payment to you. You’re working 16 hours every day and if you leave it to Google alone, you’re lucky some days to make 5 cents. If you don’t find another way of making money with your website you’re going to have to abandon your ambition to earn a living working for yourself from home. Otherwise you’ll be living in a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere.

You discover that you can be making up to $180 extra per month selling text link ads on your site. You’ll be glad for even $50 extra per month. You figure any little bit will help so you go ahead and join a program that will sell text links on your site. It doesn’t even occur to you that you might be violating anyone’s rules and regulations. You’re just thinking, the point of all this is to make money. You need to make money because you need to eat. You need a roof over your head. Maybe you have a family depending on you. You took a chance starting a website. You didn’t start a website, whatever kind of website it might be, a blog, a dating site, an online store, because you had time on your hands to waste. You did it for the same reason people go out and start businesses. It’s a business endeavor and your livelihood depends on money coming out of it.

But before you start selling text link ads on your website, you should know that you could lose the page rank that makes your site an asset to buyers of text link ads to begin with. You could even get your site kicked out of Google’s index.

For more information about text links and google read Text Links And Google: Should You Keep Or Drop Text Links From Your Site?

Google has shown during a recent page rank update that it means business where cracking down on sites buying and selling text link ads is concerned and they don’t care who you are, how big or how small, how well-known or obscure your website.

Hopefully the companies like text-link-ads.com will try to work within Google’s guidelines in order to protect buyers and sellers. Google has tried to make allowances so honest people like you who are just looking for some additional income to come out of their website can sell text link ads without having to be penalized, simply by adding a no-follow rel tag to the links. But such a tag creates a situation where those buyers who buy text links for the purpose of boosting their page rank will not get the boost in page rank they paid for; and it would seem a large number of text link ad buyers are people looking to pay to get a higher page rank.

What this means is that the companies that bring buyers and sellers of text link ads together would see a large drop in their own profits if they complied with Google’s rules regarding the no-follow rel tag because their buyers would drop off significantly if the benefit they’re after is no longer present. So complying creates a problem for them; but not complying creates a problem for you. And in a way not complying can create a problem for them as well if enough of the websites in their inventory get penalized with a lowered page rank or get de-indexed by Google for buying text links ads or selling text link ads. It seems like complying would be in the best interest of everyone. After all, people who buy links on other sites to try to boost their page rank are essentially cheating the system. Those who buy ads for honest reasons will not be affected by a no-follow rel tag so the no-follow rel tag only impacts the cheaters. Unfortunately it seems the cheaters are larger in number. Everyone wants a high page rank. A high page rank means your website is worth something; and nowadays if you can’t get a high page rank the old fashioned way (earn it) you get it the new fashioned way (buy it). But is it fair that your site should get placed higher than another site regardless if your site is a higher quality site or not because you boosted your page rank by paying for text links? Google doesn’t think so; and when Google finds out that’s what you’ve done they drop your page rank or kick you out of their index. Of course you would be the seller of the text link ad and not the buyer, but don’t imagine that means you’re safe from Google’s wrath. Google penalizes both buyers and sellers of text link ads.

Google is God, and God has been punishing buyers and sellers of text link ads lately. We have been chastised ourselves. God dropped our page rank because we’ve sold text link ads on our website. At least we’re supposing that’s the reason. We can’t think of any other reason for our page rank to have dropped. But why would God penalize little old us?

We sell the ads so we can pay our bills. But God doesn’t seem to understand that, which makes no sense because God understands everything. God sees all. God knows all; therefore God knows that our intention with selling text link ads on our website is to help us manage to pay the bills to keep the website running; to help us manage to pay our rent, our utilities. God knows we don’t make enough money as it is and we’re in crisis every month. So why would God penalize us for trying to make a living?

Some interesting reads on Google and text link ads

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google

No More Text Link Ads and Paid Links?

SellingText Links Ads And Google Penalization: What You Need To Know

Google is currently in the process of updating page rank and depending on whether they go up, go down or maintain the same page rank as before the update, millions of webmasters will be affected in one way or another by Google over the next few days. We, for example, started the morning with a modest page rank of 4 which we’ve held for a good while now, and at some point during the day we noticed that our page rank had been dropped to 3. Our site is pretty small and relatively obscure, so you’d think we wouldn’t be much affected by the drop in page rank. But even a small, obscure website like ours suffers a loss when a Google update results in a lowered page rank, because Google is considered to be the begin and the end, the alpha and the omega of the Internet.

In an October 2002 piece by Stefanie Olsen for CNET news.com, Danny Sullivan of searchenginewatch.com is quoted as saying, “So many people are dependent on Google’s free editorial traffic that it’s like food out of their mouths to lose ranking.”

The majority of the little traffic we receive daily comes from Google, and if indeed a drop in page rank results in lower placement in search results, then we will be seeing a reduction in the little traffic we’ve been managing to get.

Unfortunately, a website like ours depends on selling advertising in order to generate income; but advertisers have no interest in advertising on properties with a low page rank. A low page rank tells an advertiser that, in the eyes of Google, a website is pretty useless. Admittedly there are other statistics that advertisers consider in addition to your Google page rank. Alexa ranking for example is used by most advertising programs and a site can have no page rank but a good Alexa ranking and still be considered worth spending money on for advertising. But more often than not, a site with a low Google page rank will also have a low Alexa rank unless that site has other means for getting traffic.

Granted Google doesn’t just arbitrarily drop your site’s ranking. At least you want to believe. But Google is hardly considerate when it comes to the plights of website owners who are unable to get well-ranked websites to link to them, and with Google putting so much emphasis and importance on link popularity, it often doesn’t matter whether or not you have quality content. Your worth comes down to a measurement of who your friends are so to speak. If you don’t have a few “rich” friends, as in friends with a page rank of 5 and higher, you’re worth nothing as far as Google is concerned.

With page rank being one of the primary decision makers for advertisers, Alexa rank also playing an important role, website owners who can’t charm their way onto the blog rolls of sites held in high esteem by Google, are forced to try to buy friends, and Google doesn’t like it when you try to buy friends. Google makes every effort to find and punish those who resort to desperate tactics to try to get their page rank higher. They argue that if your site is worth anything it will somehow find its way into the in crowd without you having to resort to tricks; but if you’re at the bottom of their pile and you don’t have money to afford to pay for advertising your website, it can be difficult to get visitors to your site to begin with. With Google being the God of search engines, if people aren’t finding you in Google, people aren’t finding you unless you can afford to advertise. It’s almost a no-win situation for website owners who don’t have funds, and don’t have extensive knowledge of how to optimize their website so that, even if they fall short on the link popularity, they can still get good search engine ranking.

Not that it’s Google’s responsibility to help you get your web site’s page rank up or to help you keep it up; but Google certainly does little to make it easier for the little guy, and without Google’s seal of approval a website with no page rank or low page and no other means for reaching it’s target audience, has little chance of getting anywhere.