SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Any webmaster who hasn’t signed up for Adcenter yet now has a great reason to sign-up as an advertiser. For a limited time, new advertisers get a free $200 credit after a $5 activation fee to open the account.
Code: DM-2-1106 or by clicking here

The code is valid till 1/15/07.
Great find courtesy of Aaron Wall.

For those webmasters using Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network as a monetization model for their sites, getting kicked out of the program hurts their bottom line. While some are guilty of blatantly violating the terms of service, many who do their best to be legitimate don’t get any reason for getting banned from the contextaul ad program. This has led to unhappiness and sometime outrage from these webmasters.

Yahoo, in an effort to communicate better with their ad partners, added a compliance manager to YPN. According to the YPN blog:

If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days.

This is excellent news for advertisers and hopefully Google will follow suit.

Search Engine Watch has a post about the first documented case of being banned on Live.com for doing link exchanges.

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Google has manual site reviewers to prevent manipulation of the search index. Since majority of the traffic to a site comes from the first 30 results, there’s suspicion of a 30 position penalty.

To avoid any appearance of a reciprocal link exchange, you can perform three-way link exchanges. This, of course, requires you to have multiple sites to offer a link from. The best way to ensure against any possible future issues with link exchanges if you are still determined to do so, however, is to request RELATED links only. Thus a wedding site may request links from wedding photographers, caterers, limo services, etc. Getting link-backs from any website under the Sun is sure to hurt in the long run if it hasn’t already.