Are text link ads spam?

ValleyWag calls out TechCrunch for another fishy advertiser.

Michael may be against spam on principle, but hey, a blogger’s gotta pay the bills. So he had no problem taking sponsorship from Text Link Ads, a company that violates Google’s terms of service by selling links for higher search ranks.

Duncan Riley (great blog design, Duncan) doesn’t understand why Text Link Ads are spammy, saying:

You’ll see them over most b5media blogs under “marketplace”, because it’s a cost effective way for advertisers to advertise with us, and yes, they do result in links and traffic to these sites directly from the blogs.

And Arrington (presumably—the comment came from "TechCrunch") says

TLA sells link ads...where’s the spam?

I’ll explain it to you guys (I left much of this as a comment on Duncan’s site).

If all that Text Link Ads and their advertisers cared about, the ads would be inserted using Javascript. It’s easier, has a larger pool of potential publishers (more peole can insert javascript than PHP/Perl/ASP/etc), and can provide exactly the same look and traffic to the end user. The only reason for using a server-side language is to make the ad links appear to be an organic part of the web page and therefore influence search rankings.

At Pheedo we had a number of potential advertisers request that we serve non-Javascript ads. We balked at this. And when we suggested it might be considered with a nofollow link, the advertisers lost interest.

In fact, the number one reason that Text Link Ads lists as a reason to advertise with them is, "Text Link Ads are served as static links that can help your natural (organic) search engine rankings."

The only difference between this and blog comment spamming is that Text Link Ads is paying the bloggers for polluting their space.

Not all people wanting to buy text links are looking to spam blogs. When Jeremy Zawodny tested out text links he found that some advertisers would be fine with a nofollow and in fact one advertiser asked Jeremy for it. And an engineer in Yahoo’s search division suggests that while plain link ads do gum up the works for a search engine, that shouldn’t be the concern of the advertisers and publishers...

Anyway, selling linkage does make life harder for search engines, but maybe that’s our problem not yours. (By "our", I mean people who actually work on the search engines themselves.)

(And no, I’m not linking to this because Arrington hasn’t written about Tagyu. Back when Tagyu launched, I was getting too much traffic and asked him not to write about it.)