Daily Archives: May 6, 2008

Affiliate Marketing, Internet, Rants

Text Link Ads refuse one of my sites

2 Comments

I just received a refusal from the advertising network Textlink-ads.com for one of my websites. This came as something of an annoyance to me, rather than a surprise, because the site itself is one of the newest of my portfolio, but one of the fastest growing.

The traffic on the website is very good, slightly below MrDaz.com presently, but should eclipse this site in the next month. However, as I said it is new. Which means it doesn’t have any Netcraft data, it doesn’t have any Google PageRank and it doesn’t have any history.

All of the useless stuff that pointless networks take into consideration when deciding whether they’ll take on a website or not.

Textlink-Ads said:

Hello Darren,

Unfortunately, at this time we feel that your site http://www.*******.com, does not meet our internal requirements to be accepted into the InLinks publishing program. We recommend that you continue marketing your website and generate a significant more amount of traffic to your site. Once you feel you have strong enough traffic — this normally takes a few months at least — you can feel free to contact us back and we will be happy to revisit the opportunity to work with you.

I was a bit annoyed and replied straight away with:

You probably shouldn’t base your decisions on Google PageRank.

Just a hint.

😉

As a consequence I won’t be using Textlink-Ads on the site even when they consider it to have met their ‘internal requirements’. I offered them the chance and they refused, their loss.

It’s frustrating but as I say, they’re the ones who will miss out.

Humour, Rants, Stolen Car

Now I’ve annoyed the Gypsies

7 Comments

You may remember when my car was stolen from the Hillcroft garage in Langstone, Newport, I put up a post calling the garage ‘thieving gypsy bastards‘. It was a comical post highlighting my anger at the garage and how my car was stolen from them, with the keys, and their ‘end of year accounts’, making the whole thing look very suspicious.

Very suspicious indeed.

Well, I’ve now had a complaint for my use of the term ‘thieving gypsy bastards’, from the Thames Valley Gypsy Association. The complaint reads:

From: Joseph G. Jones [info@gypsy-association.com]
Subject: Unpleasant remark

Please remove the term “Thieving gypsy bastards” from your website, as a community we find the term offensive.

If you wish to call the garage names feel free, but please leave us out of it.

Besides which it makes you seem like a racist.

Reagrds

Joseph G. Jones
Thames Valley Gypsy Association

Joseph found my website because I rank on the first page of Google for the term ‘Thieving Gypsy Bastards’. This site tends to rank for most phrases it uses, and will no doubt rank again for the term for this particular blog post.

However, as you can see while the original post does rank for ‘thieving gypsy bastards’ it doesn’t actually have a go at gypsies at all. It’s referencing the garage and the fact that my car was stolen from there. If I were to remove the post, my site would no longer rank for the term and more, anti-gypsy posts would rank in Google in its place.

Therefor, my post being there is helping.

Plus, the term ‘thieving gypsy bastards’ doesn’t reference gypsies at all, it’s a reference to a comic strip in Viz, which is infamous and even has its own Wikipedia page. An extract from the page reads:

The comic got in trouble with the United Nations after featuring a strip called ‘The Thieving Gypsy Bastards’; unbeknownst to the Viz editorial team at the time, Gypsies are regarded as a race under UK law and thus the comic was guilty of racism. During the resultant court case, UK newspaper The Sun ran a story revealing that the principal Roma man who initiated the action against them was in fact also being tried for, and was later found guilty of, handling stolen property.

Hilarious!