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.