Search Engine Land Partner Program Launched

We’ve got a new ad program here on Search Engine Land — the
Search Engine Land
Partners Program. Since we’ve
announced it on our
parent site, I wanted to explain a bit more on how the text ad program works
(and for those already leaping to conclusions, no, it’s not a paid links for
ranking system).

Over in our right-hand navigation, you’ll see a box called "Search Engine
Land Partners." That box will contain up to ten paid text ads. We’ve had a lot
of interest in advertising on the site, but we don’t want to add more 125×125
graphical boxes like you see at the top of the page. This was a way for us to
accommodate others who help make the site possible while keeping the site
speedy.

The program is also unique in that unlike the graphical ads, it works on a
revenue sharing model. Our
advertising info
page explains more about this, as well as how to purchase the premium graphical
unit.

Links are delivered out of JavaScript, which means search spiders shouldn’t
be picking them up. That eliminates concerns we’re selling paid links for
ranking purposes. If you don’t run JavaScript, the links will be tagged with

nofollow.

We actually tried to make even the JavaScript links have nofollow, but it
gave our ad server fits. As I’ve explained, nofollow for JavaScript-delivered
links wasn’t necessary if you wanted to avoid being seen as selling links for
ranking purposes. I mainly wanted it for the inevitable person who will look at
the JavaScript-delivered links, not see nofollow on them and start screaming
we’re violating search engine guidelines. We’re not.

I’m also aware that plenty of people disagree that paid links should somehow
be flagged as nofollow. That’s fine. I got into a
discussion about this
last December over at SEOmoz, sparked by
my post about the
subject. People are free to make their own decisions. Our decision is to use
nofollow.

Finally, thanks to all our initial sponsors and partners:
CoffeeCup Software,
Eric Ward,
WebmasterRadio.FM,
The Daily SearchCast
and our sister sites
Search Marketing Expo and
Search Marketing Now.
It was tough getting our sister sites to come into the program, but we convinced
them in the end :)

Also thanks again to our founding sponsors who continue on in the 125×125
units: Ask.com,
Google,
Ingenio,
Microsoft adCenter,
Text Link Ads and
Yahoo Search Marketing.