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I am not sure what your reply refers to, but I so dislike unhelpful snark, especially when it doesn’t even understand the issue.

I am not sure what your reply refers to, but I so dislike unhelpful snark, especially when it doesn’t even understand the issue.

I am being totally serious.  Google has clearly stated that paid links go against their guidelines and they will lower your pagerank if they determine your site has them.  Check here for more information. 

Your pagerank is what allows you go get paid from TLA.  The reason you are getting paid with no traffic is because people buying links could care less about your traffic.  What they really want is your link juice.  That raises their page rank which in turn helps them climb in the search rankings.  Of course this is exactly why Google has waged this war against paid links, they don’t like that link buyers are gaming the system.

Only Google knows exactly how pagerank is used but personally $20 per month is not worth risking my pagerank, especially for an important site.  Theoretically a loss of pagerank could bury your site in the rankings though nobody knows if this is what really happens for sure.

Metsgrrl, I apologize if this comes off as being snarky, but you are violating Google’s terms to be considered by them a good net citizen.

Edit:  Of course, not all paid links violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, but the links provided by TLA do.  Again, they are directed at selling pagerank.  Their latest software has options to attempt to hide the paid links by removing all hints of advertising.  The effectiveness of these tactics are unknown.

have you already reported me to Google? Good for you. I’m sure Sergey will come over to your house and give you a cookie.

I already have the merit badges for Doing Good On the Internet For Free and Refusing To Sell A Site To The Man Because The Internet Should Be Free and Spending My Own Money To Host Websites When They Were Not Cheap. I have been doing this for a very long time. I do not need unsolicited moral judgments from someone who doesn’t know me or my situation.

If anyone on this thread can offer me technical assistance with implementation of Text Link Ads on EE, I would continue to appreciate your help.

metsgrrl, I don’t think anyone attacked or even criticized you here. No need to be upset. I at least didn’t understand John’s posts that way.

You kinda hijacked this general thread about online advertising to place your personal support request. If the general discussion goes on between your posts, I think you gonna have to live with it unless you open your own thread.

When do you get that error? When saving the template with the TLA code or when opening the webpage that has the code inside?

I don’t report paid text links.  That link was just a good explanation for Google’s view of text link ads.  Keep in mind that Google is important because TLA relies heavily on Google page rank. 

As Silenz mentioned, this thread started as a request for info on Adsense alternatives.  When this thread started I think TLA was a good choice.  The field of web marketing moves fast though and today I don’t think TLA is as good of a choice anymore.

If you are willing to risk your pagerank and post paid reviews then PayPerPost or ReviewMe pay far better than TLA for many people.

I don’t have any tech advice for TLA though.  I haven’t even tried putting TLA on my EE sites because I am not willing to take that risk for the small monthly payment TLA would give me.  Anything is better than nothing, but there are still better ways to monetize a site.

I’ve been trying to install TLA on my EE site, but every time I do, I get a 503.

I *THINK* I may be able to help you out.  I ran into the same issue with the 503 Server Temporarily Unavailable error today.

First the error itself.  I was attempting to create a template containing the PHP code from Text-Link-Ads.  I would paste the code into the Template Editor and when I would hit ‘Update’ I would get the 503 error.  From the EE threads that I found, it seemed like it was a problem with the web host.  I tried to isolate what ‘text’ in the PHP code was causing the error to be thrown.  I found that several functions such as fopen, preg_replace, fread (and probably others) were causing this error.  I then found out that my host, Dreamhost, does not allow fopen to be used.

I admit that I’m new to all this.  However, this explanation didn’t make much sense to me since I’m using the same PHP code with my Wordpress blog (also with Dreamhost).  Apparently the error only happens when I’m using the Template Editor to update the template.  My solution was to create a blank template using the Template Editor and then go into the database and add the PHP code to the template manually.  The template can be found in the exp_templates table.  Just copy/paste the PHP code into the template_data field for the template you just created.

After doing this the Text-Link-Ads showed up fine in my sidebar.  😊  (Make sure you have created the blank XML file that TLA requires; if not you’ll be prompted with a reminder.)

Hope this helps!

To stay on topic, I’d agree with the TLA recommendation.  I’ve been running it for about a year and have been pleased for the most part.  I don’t know how much (if any) it has affected my PR as I’ve gone from 3 to 5 in the last year.  TLA brings in about 2.5-3x the revenue I get from Google Adsense.  Now if I only I could cut out the middleman! 😉