A couple of weeks ago, Brian received an early afternoon email informing him of a pretty intriguing advertising offer. We were told that industry pundit, and Yahoo insider, Jeremy Zawodny would soon be accepting advertising - text link ads, to boot. Naturally, we were excited - the demographic of Jeremy’s readership is a nice fit for BOTW eyeballs. We signed up by the end of the day.

Prior to placing the ad, we discussed the possibility of requesting Jeremy place a rel=”nofollow” tag within our link. We are no strangers to using advertising with the link condom (ha). While we always try to err on the side of caution, nowhere does this hold more truth than in the purchasing of text link advertising, which continues to draw the highest level of inspection. Just recently, we purchased some text link advertising on SEOmoz (before all his awesome publicity - d’oh), and used the rel=”nofollow” tag there. We have used the tag fairly often when purchasing advertising - particularly when the ad will be run of site.

Ultimately, we decided not to ask Jeremy for the tag. Primarily, we hoped that we would get the “juice” that we needed to start pulling better in Yahoo, an engine in which we have historically had difficulty making significant headway. Ironically, we were not trying to manipulate Anchor Text/PR for Google purposes, but quantity of links in an attempt to boost our Yahoo listings.

In light of the debate raging in more than a handful of the industry must-reads:

Matt Cutts’ Text link follow-up
Greg Boser’s Zawodny Says No to Link Condoms
Zawodny’s Sponsored Links
Danny Sullivan’s Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny Caught In Link Selling Debate
Oilman’s Links, Condoms, Shit and Fans
Threadwatch Jeremy Zawodny Sells Out-bound Links

we have decided to ask Jeremy to add the rel=”nofollow” tag. (I just received an email from Jeremy saying that he’d “rig up the code to do that within a day”) In hindsight, we should have requested it from the beginning, and I hope that this is not now a case of closing the barn door after the cows have run out. Unfortunately, most likely we will not get the bang in Yahoo serps that we had anticipated, but we will still get in front of industry peers, webmasters, site owners, and additional savvy internet users - our most coveted audience.

I am sure that many will question our decision, some may agree with it, while others may view it as caving in. Our primary concern will always be the quality and integrity of the directory, and all of the BOTW products. It is our job to ensure the value that we provide to our users never falters, and we will continue to maintain a policy consistent with that mantra. While we do strive to set ourselves apart from others in the industry, given the current climate in the web directory space, we feel that a cautious plan of action would be the wisest choice for us to pursue.

Going forward we will continue to put our marketing dollars into various forms of online (and offline) advertising. As each online ad buy will be a unique situation, we will decide upon using the rel=”nofollow” tag as the circumstances dictate.

I am sure that the debate will continue in the forums and blogosphere. Hopefully this closes the chapter on it for BOTW.

Jeremy posts a late-night follow up: Struck the Sponsored Links Nerve, Did I?
Jim Boykin plays devil’s advocate: Buying links under the radar so Matt can’t find them

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Industry News, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.