Advertise Right!

[Jared Ritchey]

The wisdom gained from those who know at the last SES Conference in California are now saying that the new standard for putting advertising on your site, not only should be followed, but may ultimately be a required format of including the "nofollow" directive in the link.

What this means is that advertising such as banners, link ads and even affiliate advertising on your sites should include the "nofollow" directive to avoid potential Search Engine changes that could hurt your rankings.

This was the #1 reason we came up with the new advertising policy for WebmasterPost.com to provide all of our advertisers the opt-in for "Advertorials" in addition to the ad or banner itself.

So Its good news, right? Well lets take a look and see!

What we have done since then is edit the core of the ad management software to include greater statistical tracking for the client (clients have their own login) and more accurate billing methods for us as we do not charge for duplicate impressions from the same IP on the same page. This also adds in the new default directive of "nofollow". So how is that good. Well for one we provide better value to the client and increase their chances of getting click throughs instead of just impressions.

The downside comes in many flavors but my personal favorite annoyance is the fact that if you link partner with ANYONE be very cautious to make sure that you verify more than just the link on their site as many people are discovering the "nofollow" directive in their links providing next to no value to them from search engines. Shady? Yep and in my personal opinion we should start a thread or heading under webmaster ethics to demonstrate the kinds of things going on out there.

Now granted this does not really hurt advertisers as all the big names in search engines rarely index ad links anyway and there is NO proof that ads on multiple sites improves ranking.

So to those webmasters on the cutting edge. Your ads should include the "nofollow" directive in the link. Example Below;

<a href="http://www.webmasterpost.com" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://www.webmasterpost.com/forum/images/wp/header/logo.gif" alt="Our Banner" border="1"></a>

~ Jared