Text Link Ads has opened their new RSS Feed Advertising service dubbed “Feedvertising.” Essentially this service allows bloggers and rss-enabled sites to insert advertisements into their RSS feeds. TechCrunch posted an announcement on th…

It’s telling that Kevin couldn’t defend his initial potshot when I called him on it.

Agenda?

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It clearly says:

“Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized…”

I’ve never seen a site penalized for placing paid links on their site – there is no logic to that. Perhaps if you link to “bad neighborhoods” then you will lose trust, but that is true regardless of whether the link is paid or natural.

Long story short……. if you start using text links don’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find you’re outbound pagerank zero’d out.

The unethical part is that many people don’t realize this and will end up being hurt. :-/

I was founder of Pheedo, an RSS ad provider, and althrough I still own stock, I don’t work for the company any longer.

I have a new startup that’s involved in the advertising industry, although I wouldn’t consider TLA a competitor in any way. (Mike, if you still read your comments, that’s what they call a scoop. )

I’m an unpaid advisor to Tailrank, Kevin Burton’s company. I think I might own a little stock as a result of that, so if Kevin does well, I might be able to afford the large coffee occasionally.

I’m a lumberjack, and I’m okay, I sleep all night and I work all day. On Wednesdays I go shoppin’ and have buttered scones for tea.

Nowhere in my article (the one that Kevin linked to) do I mention Adsense. Nor do I say it’s against a TOS of any sort. I do have a quote from valleywag that mentioned (erroniously) the Google search TOS.

What I DO say is that Google doesn’t like it. Great. Why should you care what Google thinks of the practice, right?

It’s true that you can do what you like on your site and don’t have to cater to Google’s whims. But don’t be surprised or even upset when Google knocks you from their index.

Gaming search engines hurts overall search quality and is bad for the interwebs. This is no different from the keyword stuffing and hidden text that was widely used when web search was young.

All I ever seem to see on is Kevin Burton whoring tailrank in signatures or profiles, usually trying to steal someone elses limelight.

If you really think TLA is gaming google you should be accusing half of the net, most sites with reasonable PR have text link ads, how can you tell which are paid for and which are ‘natural’?

It really can’t get any simpler than this….

They’re paying bloggers to create artificial links to game/spam Google. It hurts everyone who needs to search for a product and finds the resulting spam. It might not be black hat SEO but it’s certainly dark gray.

As far as blogging are concerned this is just about as unethical as you can get….

“Yet all your business model does is aggregate content from blogs. Are you giving money back to the bloggers? Huh, interesting. ”

I give the same thing that Google, Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, and Techmeme give – traffic… I’m not hearing any complaints.

Kevin

I’ve had great success over the past month with TLA, both from the advertiser as well as publisher side. On the advertiser side I’m judging performance from click-throughs (more than I expected so far) and on the publisher side I’m making much more money on my blog than using AdSense.

These guys are doing a great job of making alternative advertising platforms work.

This morning, I just recieved an email from Patrick Gavin, the President of Text Link Ads Inc. He invited me to test their new service about feeds advertising (known as Feedvertising) but he don’t want me to announce it to the public because it …