Donna over at Seo-Scoop.com wrote a ponderous post today musing about why more people in the SEO industry aren’t more willing to advertise if no Google juice is involved.

I love Scratchback and the whole concept behind it (Scratchback is that widget to the right that says Are You In My TopSpots?). I might not be totally crazy about the nofollowed links, but hey, they are Google-friendly, so I’m doing the “right thing”, right? I understand people don’t want to pay a lot of money for G-friendly links – I get that. But when it’s difficult to practically give them away – what’s up with that???

She then asks the million dollar question (bold emphasis is mine)…

When did the concept of advertising disappear? Is it ONLY about link juice? Hey, I’m an SEO. I love link juice. It’s the nectar of the search heavens. But I also appreciate the idea of cheap, targeted traffic. Juice or no juice, what I want at the end of the day, is cheap, targeted traffic. You don’t?

You can read my thoughts on this topic in her comments.

Very interesting discussion to say the least.

Rumor, or truth, nobody is sure, but speculation is that the recent Google pagerank drops are a direct counter by Google to “decrease” relevance on sites that sell text links. If true, that is a DIRECT frontal-offensive move at the TextLinkAds business model.

The reasoning on this make sense for Google (see Darren’s comments below), but the problem is, for TLA, that their business model is built on passing “Google Juice”.

I can understand the text link penalties though – people buy text links so that they can increase their ranking in Google. People buy AdSense because they want traffic. Google don’t want their search results manipulated so they work against text links. I don’t like it any more than you do – but I can see their reasoning.

Right. So how can TLA survive in it’s current business model if the rumors are true?

Furthermore, would you buy a text link from them if they had a “nofollow” in it?

I like the guys at TLA, but personally, I never did like the model of “passing Google juice” for cash. It always seemed very gamey to me.

More talk at Searchengineland. Original story from Andy B. Much more at Techmeme.