Do Text Link Ads really work?

We have just sold our fourth TLA and I wanted to see if they’ve benefited the advertisers in SEO. The easiest way to test that is to search on MSN’s Live Search (link:www.thedomain.com) for the sites linking to each of the advertiser’s domains.

First up, H&R Block (Tax Software). This is a gigantic company so there are obviously tons of sites linking to it. Surprisingly enough, Mike Rundle’s Business Logs (9rules) shows up on page 10 of the results, Mind Petals page 11, Tyler Cruz and YGG on page 12. Not too shabby for such a large company.

Next, Levenger (Briefcases). YGG shows up on page 4 along with Innovation Zen and just after Shmula. Pretty impressive.

Third, Safe-T-Water (portable water filter bottle). We are the third from the top of the first page. The first being GoBackpacking which features Safe-T-Water via TLA as well.

Last, Franchise Gator (Work at Home Opportunities!). TLA sold this ad less than an hour ago, so we obviously don’t show up in the results yet. But other bloggers like Yaro Starak (page 1) and Mind Petals (page 9) do, thanks to Text Link Ads.

For the larger of the four companies, H&R and Levenger, someone would’ve noticed that their search results weren’t accurate and/or not too many sites were linking to them. In steps TLA.

For the smaller two, Safe-T-Water and Franchise Gator, TLA seems to be an easy way to get larger sites to link to them and in the end, improve their PageRank.

When it comes to Text Link Ads effect on search results and keyword relevancy, a simple search on Google is the ultimate test.

When searching for the exact phrase that the advertisers used for their links, Tax Software (H&R Bock) comes up first overall, Briefcases (Levenger) comes up first overall, portable water filter bottle (Safe-T-Water) didn’t make it into the first 10 pages of results, Work at Home Opportunities! (Franchise Gator) also didn’t make it into the first 10 pages.

So we’ve got two sites that take top spot on Google and two that are lost in the results. There are a couple reasons why the water bottle and franchise links don’t show up. For the Franchise Gator, its keywords return 209,000,000 search results. That is a flooded market. No matter how many TLAs they buy, I think they may need to focus on a more specific and unique phrase.

For Safe-T-Water, the majority of results are all on shopping comparison websites. Being that it appears to be a small company and hasn’t done much on the web in the past, targeting more sites with TLA may help them rise in the rankings, but joining the comparison shopping sites and pushing their product on there may be their best bet.

When all is said and done, Text Link Ads do seem to work. On the blogger’s side, you get to make some pocket change and your site may show up in the search results for the advertiser’s terms (any SEO is good).

On the advertiser’s side, they definitely help in the search rankings and relevancy, keyword association, and possibly PageRank.