Selling Text Link Ads on your blog as a source of income or buying advertising links to get promoted on a great blog? Think Again. If Google has anything to say about it Text Link Ads will go down in burning flames (right along with your ad revenue stream), and you’ll have their beloved Page Rank algorithm and an apparent (indirect) disdain for bloggers to thank for all this. Google’s attempt to deflate the TLA market hurts bloggers the most, but you’d have to be a blind Egyptian on Mars if you didn’t see this one coming.

Do the Googlies have their goggles on backwards?

From Performancing:

For better of for worse, an economy has built around the buying and selling of links. Google doesn’t like the TLA economy very much. That’s not news. We’ve all known that for a while. It screws with their fundamental metric of a page’s value. Really, the big surprise so far has been Google’s lack of decisive action in this regard.

Up until now, they’ve taken a bunch of half-measures, like placing a delay on the Toolbar PageRank.

But it seems that things, well, they are a changing. A Spring Offensive is underway.

Apparently, Google is unleashing an army of unwitting Googleteer tattletales to report blogs selling ads or buying text ad links via Matt Cutts, the lead singer in the Search Engine Optimization Band at Google. His primary role is to enforce Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam; go figure.

Does having text link ads screw with Google’s beloved page rank system or does it devalue their Adsense presence…?

If Google has it’s way with text link brokers then many bloggers who depend on this revenue stream will be hit hard. For the small scale blogger, Google AdSense brings in pennies a day. Text Link Ads has the potential of making all the time and hard work worth it. It scales down well to the little guy. Google AdSense, on the other hand, doesn’t scale nearly as well.

How does Google’s recent purchase of DoubleClick fit into all this?

Anyway, I’ve found this information rather alarming since I know a lot of bloggers that use Text Link Ads. I’m curious to know what other folks think about this…

As one commenter writes “Google let the Linking Genie out of the bottle.”