I was having a chat with an online buddy a couple of weeks back regarding monetising your affiliate blog. My own blog has damned little in the way of money making schemes on it. I want my blog to be seen as a source of information, not a way of lining my own pockets. Affiliate Marketers are wise to monetisation schemes in all shapes and forms, so a cynical money making exploit on my part would soon have all my dear readers departing in droves.
However, sometimes I think it would be good to find a way to create a small revenue stream to help motivate my posting whilst still providing good information for my blog readers and without filling the place with irritating text links and other distracting advertising methods.
Today I’ve just heard about Workcircle’s new blog widget which allows you to display affiliate marketing jobs of relevance to your readership. Much like the Bumpzee and MyBlogLog widgets, all you have to do is paste a small bit of HTML code into an appropriate location on your blog.
This is what their widget looks like in-situ: -
June 15th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
That looks like a great widget. Do you know if it breaks Google’s T’s and C’s if we use Adsense and Workcircle?
June 23rd, 2007 at 8:34 am
I asked Tony at Workcircle about this, and he has examined Google’s T’s and C’s and reports that there should be no issue using this widget on pages with Adsense featured.
July 6th, 2007 at 10:10 am
It’s not added a huge amount of revenue to my coffers but it’s a nice interesting feature that people should find useful - and I think half the time that an important aspect people miss when blogging.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Blair,
I would avoid this particular widget unless they clean up their act
What workcircle dont point out to you is that the widget contains hidden links promoting the keyword “Jobs”. Hidden links are against googles T&Cs and can result in google removing the site that the hidden links are on from the index. In other words your site gets the penulty as a result of importing dodgy code. Not worth the risk.
If you view the code source on this page for the widget you will see the following within the widget code:-
Jobs from Workcircle.com
An anchor text link for the keyword “Jobs” wrapped in a no script tag.
I dont know why workcircle would want to do this other than to game search engines to rank them better for the term “Jobs”. It will be a matter of time before google pulls them for it.
If you read Matt Cutts from Googles blog on hidden links this kind of thing is clearly against their T&Cs
It would be interesting to read workcircles responce to this
TJ
October 29th, 2007 at 2:01 am
- Moderator-
N.B the code that starts with the noscript tag has obviously come out as the search engine would read it, not as posted by me here highlighting the noscript tag - perhaps you could take the
February 16th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
I have not seen this before but I’m definetly going to do due diligence on it.
I would like to incorporate this into my bolg and alert my readers to it’s existence but I’m a little confused here.
Does the widget indeed contain hidden links that Google would frown upon?
If so I would probably steer clear.