Order of the Bath

While browsing around to solve a problem I came across this interesting post by a Google guru about what they think of paid links. Now I can see where they are coming from, they want to improve the customer experience so that you find stuff relevant to what you are searching for. So from that point of view, the links to casinos on the Linux site, to quote the example given, are certainly not helpful.

However we should remember that Google are in the advertising business (that is their main revenue source) so there is a bit of a conflict of interest here. When it comes down to it, what is the difference between a paid link and an advertisement; I have seen some pretty dubious Google Ad-Sense adverts on some news pages where they have picked up on words out of context: for example this news story about Charles Darwin included adverts for hotels in Darwin, Australia when I read it. I would prefer to see a well directed paid link than a robot generated advertisement.

In case you were wondering, I have promised to keep this blog ad-free but I see no problem with relevant advertising links on my other pages, though I will always identify then as such. It is the only way to make an extensive public information site financially viable.

This entry was posted on 18 May 2007 at 11:16 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.