Tricked Deck
I read the presentation page for The Deck today. As described, The Deck is a closed advertising network which is picky about its members and the ads it serve. And I have to say I like their concept. There is one claim in the description I find dubious however. Under “Cost Per Influence” they write:
Plus, The Deck ads are not redirected and the average page rank of the eight Deck sites is 7.125 which can make a significant difference in an advertiser’s search rankings during and well after a campaign is complete.
The theory behind this is that when a website ranks high in search engines, it helps to increase the ranking of the websites it links to. So if an important website were to feature an ad which links somewhere, that somewhere could make some gain in search engine rankings.
But I’m pretty sure it won’t work in case of The Deck simply because of this:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.northmay.com/deck/deckd_js.php"></script>
Whatever the page rank of their site, if they place their ads on the pages using JavaScript (and all sites on the network do), there is no sane way a search engine is going to even notice there is a link.
Well, maybe that’s not what they meant by “can make a significant difference in an advertiser’s search rankings”, maybe they are talking about the non-JavaScript link in the “About The Ads” section of their page for The Deck. But the inclusion of their average page rank seems pretty much misleading if thats the case.
Comments
You’re absolutely right. But the part that amazed me the most is “[…] and well after a campaign is complete”.
Since the pagerank of the site is not likely to increase because of the javascript, there’ll be not real benefits after the campaign; only during the campaign.
Well, my point was that there would be no benefit at all for the linked page because of the JavaScript, even while the ad is on display. But if the link was visible to search engines, and if search engines were using it to increase the page rank of the linked page, any ranking increase would probably stick for a while after the link has dissapeared. That’s probably what they meant by after.