In case you haven't noticed, the latest Toolbar PR rollout has been abnormal and slow. In the grand scheme of things, Toolbar PR is close to meaningless (Argument From Absurdity: it tells us that Performancing is more important than the DrudgeReport).

Yet as things go, hundreds of thousands of bloggers and website owners are attached to the hip of this stale, useless tool. Why?

Simplistically, the story goes like this.

Google literally came out of nowhere (a garage) to dominate the search space. The reason? They filtered search results not just by on-page text but by off-site "voting" in the form of links.

PageRank is the term that Google invented to describe their "importance" metric. While their filtering systems have changed dramatically since their emergence into search dominance, PageRank is a simple icon of Google's successful formula.

Despite the fact that Toolbar PageRank is often 3-9 months stale, and despite the fact that Google now intelligently buffers the importance of raw links based on a number of smart factors, Toolbar PageRank is still the king of the hill...the center of gravity for thousands of web publishers and seo artists.

Because of this, a massive virtual economy has built up around PageRank in the last half-decade. Some web publishers make upwards of 5 (and for all I know, even six) figures per month simply by selling this awkwardly valuable commodity.

Rightly so, Google sees the buying and selling of PageRank as a negative manipulation of their once innocent metric. In reaction, Google has implemented a number of temporal buffers to deter the text link ad market. So far, they have not been successful.

But as rumors build that Google is either completely dropping or radically altering the way they tabulate, update and display PageRank, lots of people are scrambling to adjust their web publishing business models. Whether its site consolidation, ad diversification, or complex SEO subtleties like anchor text variation, deep-linking or post-level link buying, it is clear that Google has succeeded in stirring a whole slew of people from their slumber. And that should be expected. We are, after all, talking about people's livelihoods.

Having set the stage, I now want to address the two issues I raise in the title of this article.

1. Does persistence always pay off?
2. Preparing for the busting of a fairly silly virtual economy built around a meaningless metric

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Save yourself time searching for ways to monetize and promote your site. TextAdSearch blog's about the text advertising industry and explains about the latest trends in text advertising.

Text Link Ads have been on my mind ever since The Link Nazi made it public that Google would be cracking down on sold links.

Many individual bloggers make the majority of their income from Text Link Ads. But I want to talk about another virtue of Text Link Ads: they can generate the revenue that publishers need to hire better writers.

If you're like me and you own a large number of blogs and websites, then you also know all about the economy of content creation. For those of you who don't know, let me educate you.

The fact of the matter is that search engines have yet to create the algorithm that can distinguish keyword rich crap from literary greatness. Since AdSense has been the main driver of content monetization, and since traffic is the key AdSense monetization, website owners have often resorted to buying lots of keyword loaded crap in preference to a few high-quality articles written by professional writers.

For $100 you can buy 1 or 2 excellent 500-1000 word articles or for $100 you can buy about 30 pieces of just legible English written by not quite fluent non-English speakers (not to offend any of our not quite fluent non-English readers). That's just a fact and the explosion of crap content on the web is directly attributable to the economy that Google AdSense has created. It is Google's monster. There's no doubt about it.

Enter Text Link Ads. The TLA economy doesn't directly depend on traffic, and so doesn't depend on squeezing pennies out of the long tail. There is far more pressure from AdSense to create lots of crap content then from TLA. In fact, I'd argue that TLA creates an environment in which owners of blog networks, or multiple sites are freed up to migrate from content churning to actually being proud of the content they commission.

In my own case this is certainly true. TLA has finally gotten me to a place where I have the luxury of paying a premium for the content I commission. Rather than pursuing bulk content, I'm pursuing quality content. Worshiping the long-tail, in the name of almighty AdSense is no longer a priority. Creating good literary content is.

Because of TLA I now feel like a legitimate publisher, whereas before I had to wash my hands of AdSense blood each night before I went to sleep (well, not really, but you get the point).

Here's a PR 8 page: http://www.corante.com/loom/. That page has been dead since June 9. 2006 when the author started writing for a different company, on a new domain.

According to Google, this outdated, non-updated page is more important than The Drudge Report which has a PR 7.

We all know that PageRank is easy to manipulate and a poor reflection of a site's value. We also know that Google has moved on from PageRank to include things like TrustRank, traffic data, etc.

Despite it's low-resolution, ease of manipulation, and inaccurate indication of a site's worth, PageRank continues to capture people's imagination. It drives the economy of Text Link Ads.

Admittedly, I buy and sell PageRank. Less so now then when I first got into the game. But I've always used discretion and have tried to hedge my bets towards sites that are poised for growth, rather than those that are in the process of decline.

In other words, for the savvy text link ad buyer, market pressure actually encourages investment in quality, growing sites, as opposed to sites with artificial PR injection or sites on the decline. That's a virtue of the TLA market in my opinion. The savvy buyers go after legit, growing sites.

Which brings me to another point. There's very little market pressure from AdSense to make quality websites. Not all quality sites translate into high AdSense earnings (many spammy sites make lots of AdSense revenue). On the other hand, any site that is growing and making progress has a product to sell in the TLA market.

But alas, I digress from the main point of this post: we really need a solid, diversified metric to measure a balance between site strength and site momentum. PageRank measures brute link strength. Alexa gives us a rough indication of a site's growth over time, but it's an easily manipulated, one-dimensional metric.

Wouldn't it be great to have a single metric that gave us a realistic picture of the health of any given website? Not just brute link strength(PageRank), and not just an indication of relative traffic (Alexa), but a measure of a site's overall presence, growth and significance *at this moment*?

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.

As many of you may know by now, Matt Cutts is calling on the webmaster world to report paid links. Cracking down on PR transferring paid links is Google's prerogative of course. And really, there not telling us we can't have unqualified paid links on our sites, just that we should be prepared to face the consequences.

So far, the consensus seems to be that rather than issuing penalties, Google will simply devalue any link juice from links they determine to be purchased. Whether Google's new methods will deflate the TLA economy remains to be seen. What's clear is that they'd like to see the TLA economy burst into a million pieces. And Google has the resources to make their wishes come true.

The sad thing about this development, as Raj Dash points out in our forums, is that for many bloggers, Text Link Ads is the only real source of monthly income. 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.

So what are your thoughts? Should Google be cracking down on Text Link Ads? Is doing so not much different than cracking down on alcohol consumption during the prohibition era (a minor pleasure for the average blogger)? Or is the imminent short-term pain a necessary corrective for the long-term health of the net?