It was noted that this is currently a manual process which could explain why it seems to be so random. My site has been hit as well dropping 2 points from PR5 to PR3. I would not care that much if someone would assure me that there would not be any future ill-effects but I do not want to take any risks here.

I decided to remove all paid links from my website which was not that hard because I did not make much money anyway. I can see that this could be a huge problem for guys like John Chow who make thousands of Dollars selling links.

The Webmaster Tools that are accessible if you have a Google Account offer a link on the main page that is entitled Request reconsideration. Webmasters who were punished by Google may ask for an reconsideration if they got rid of the factor that penalized them in first place.

While I’m not sure that this is about selling links and not some general PR drop across the board I don’t want to take chances here. I did ask for a reconsideration and hope that I will receive a positive answer from Google once they checked that my site is no longer selling links.

I’m wondering what those webmasters will be doing who did not get hit until now. It currently really does not matter that much but it could hurt a lot of people if the websites would get penalized further in the Google search engine.

Related posts

• Reevaluating Google is the best theory (12)
• Page Rank Tool To Check All Pages Of A Domain (10)
• Matt Cutts confirms Google Punishment (1)
• Are you selling links ? Watch your Pagerank ! (4)
• Youtube Videos Get Automatic Captions. 1080p Videos Roll-Out (1)

Points can be in turn used to buy links for your websites or cashed out. The current exchange rate is $0.63 for 1000 points. PR4 pages at Ghacks generate 3750 points which equals roughly $2.36 per month for that page. A PR5 page would earn double that amount per month.

If you compare the prices to Text Link Ads you see that you could earn more money from TNX especially if you take into consideration that up to 4 links can be played on every page of your website.

I have currently earned 75000 points with Ghacks which is about $50. It takes some time until links have been placed on all pages. I currently have links on about 40 pages which is not much. I do delete all links on PR0 pages because this earns me just 7.5 points which is next to nothing in my opinion. 1000 Links on PR0 pages would earn me $5 which is ridiculous. So, all PR0 links get deleted.

My estimation is that I could earn about $300 per month from playing one link on every page that has a Pagerank greater than 0 or $1200 if I go for the overkill and place four links on each page.

Points can also be sold in webmaster forums and in the forum at TNX which unfortunately has no activity at all at the moment. I suppose you could try and sell points at forums like Digitalpoint or Namepros instead for a better conversion rate than $0.63 because webmasters buying links do pay $1.2 for 1000 points at the moment.

Read More:

TNX

Related posts

• Monetize your website with TNX ads (12)
• The Rubicon Project (0)
• Which Adsense Ads and Locations work best on my blog ? (6)
• My Blog Earnings for July 2007 (4)
• Money Makers: Text Link Ads (1)

After reading about other incidents he asked Google directly and got the confirmation that this was indeed a drop because of the link selling. While a Pagerank drop might be troublesome for some webmasters who make a good chunk of their monthly earnings from selling text links it might even lead to an exclusion of the website from the Google Search Engine.

This would be catastrophic for many webmasters who decided to live from the revenue that their websites generate. Another Pagerank drop that came to my mind instantly was the drop of JohnChow.com from Pagerank 6 to 5. John is very open minded about his earnings posting a monthy income report on his website.

He made more than $2000 from selling text links in September. If this drop was a penalty for the link selling is not know as of yet but it could be very likely the reason.

Apparently websites hit by a Pagerank decrease may request a review. How and where is not yet know but it could become available as an option in Google’s Webmaster Central.

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

A way to report sites that sell links was introduced earlier on as well and it could become common to report the competition if they are indeed selling links.

Will you keep on selling links on your website even with the chance that your site will be penalized by Google ?

Read More:

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
via Google Reducing PageRank of Websites That Sell Paid Text Links

Related posts

• Reevaluating Google is the best theory (12)
• Page Rank Tool To Check All Pages Of A Domain (10)
• Matt Cutts confirms Google Punishment (1)
• Have you been hit with a Pagerank drop ? (11)
• Youtube Videos Get Automatic Captions. 1080p Videos Roll-Out (1)

The value of a link depends on the pagerank of the site, the total amount of incoming links, the category of the website and the number of outgoing links. A calculator on the TNX website gives webmasters a rough idea on how much they could make from TNX with their site.

The amount of backlinks is fetched automatically. Webmasters need to edit the website category and amount of pages that have a certain pagerank. Ghacks for instance has a link popularity of 99862 and 2290 pages. At the beginning all those pages were assigned a pagerank of 0 which resulted in a monthly income of $10.91.

While this does not seem very impressive it becomes so when adding pages with a higher pagerank to the calculation. I was not able to find out the pagerank of all of my internal pages. If my site would have 100 PR5 links it would earn more than $450 per month if all links were sold and one link would be displayed on each page. The maximum amount of four links would lead to $1839.

This means the average webmaster will be able to earn more from TNX than from Text Link Ads or other advertisers.The links can be placed as php code which should be suitable for most webmasters and have to be visible and not be placed at the bottom of the site. Placing them below your articles for instance should be fine.

A great feature are the payment methods, paypal, check and wire for instance are supported.

Adding Sites to TNX:

Adding sites to TNX’s network is pretty easy. Add the php code to your website first. Wordpress users can add the code for instance to their single.php file which means that every article page will contain the code automatically.

After adding the code you have to add the site to the system itself. Just add url and several other parameters like site language and you are ready to go. It takes between 1-3 days to get a site accepted – or rejected. When the site is accepted you are ready to earn money with TNX.

The main advantage for webmasters is that advertisers only select a category, the amount of sites and the pageranks that they want to buy. Everything else is done automatically by the TNX script. This means that it does not matter if you are John Chow or John Doe, no one will have advantages in this system.

Pages cost a certain amount of points to order which can be exchanged into cash, here is how much each page costs and brings.

Minimum Link Prices:

PR 0: 0001 point ($0,00114)
PR 1: 0050 points ($0.057)
PR 2: 0100 points ($0,114)
PR 3: 0200 points ($0,228)
PR 4: 0500 points ($0,57)
PR 5: 1000 points ($1,14)
PR 6: 2500 points ($2,85)
PR 7: 5000 points ($5,7)

This means that advertisers can buy 20000 PR0 pages for a little bit more than $11.

Minimum Earnings:

TNX’s commission is 12.5% which means that you earn 0,85 points per PR0 link and 875 points for every PR5 link.

Referring other webmasters:

If you refer other webmasters you do earn 13,5% of the points that they earn (lifetime earnings) which can sum up quite nicely over time. You will also receive 5% of all payments made by those referred webmasters.

Read More:

TNX

Related posts

• A second look at TNX (0)
• The Rubicon Project (0)
• Pandora adds commercials (3)
• Money Makers: Text Link Ads (1)
• Have a blog ? Make it a successful one ! (2)

Text Link Ads is a service that is very attractive for small websites that have at least a pagerank of 4. If you do not know your pagerank you can look it up at blogflux. Once accepted into text-link-ads you have to edit a few settings, add a description for instance and define the maximum amount of ads you want to show on your website. The last step would be to paste the code into your website.

Plugins exist for many known plattforms like Wordpress or Blogger but generic php code that works on every website can be used as well.

As I said the main advantage is the fact that your visitor level is not that important and a pagerank of 4 can be achieve pretty quickly by submitting the site to some directories and search engines. Earnings vary according to some factors including pagerank, backlinks and Alexa ranking.

You can use a free tool to check your site and see how much you approximately would earn from Text Link Ads. Just enter your url and click on the placement to see how much it could be. This is of course not a fix value.

I guess most PR4 sites will gain about $7,50 per link which is probably way more than they would earn with Google Adsense.

I would like to conclude this article with some expert tips. Sites grow over time and you probably have wondered what happens if your pagerank or backlinks rise to a higher level, will you automatically earn more ? The answer is no. This is one of the flaws in the system if you ask me.

You do have to contact the Text Link Ads team and ask them to raise the price that they demand for the links on your website. They react pretty quickly on those inquiries and any new link will be sold for the higher price. You can also ask them to remove links that still pay the old price. If you have started with $7,50 for instance and someone bought a link at that time he will still pay $7,50 even if your price is now at $30.

So, if you can’t change a setting by yourself call them and ask them. They will help you out.

I would suggest to join the Text Link Ads service if your website meets the requirement.

Related posts

• Monetize your website with TNX ads (12)
• Create Links from unlinked URLs (2)
• Are you selling links ? Watch your Pagerank ! (4)
• A second look at TNX (0)