With Google’s recent crackdown on paid links, some say in an attempt to increase their takings from the advertising pie, a number of blogs that rely on Google for search engine traffic have been hit hard. If your blog falls into this category, then your choices are as follows:
- Comply with Google – stop selling sponsored links + replace it with AdSense
- Make your blog less Google-dependent for traffic
If you’re leaning towards the latter, here are three ideas to help Google do less evil:
- Retain your audience by promoting your RSS feeds to them – people who subscribe will bypass the Google intermediary layer
- Use your blog as the sharing mechanism it’s designed to be – through comments on other peoples’ blogs, trackbacks, pings, social bookmarking and blog communities like mybloglog, twitter etc
- Get a good domain name that is generic enough that web users will naturally type-in the address e.g. realestate.com.au or podcast.com
All good advice! I’m very glad I still had/have subscribers!
And if you think you’ve been completely kicked out of google for text link ads…. first check that you haven’t been hacked! oops!