To Ad or Not To Ad?

[supermighty]

I was reading an article at kuro5hin where the author suggests that new websites hold off on putting advertiesments on their pages. He feels that that pages without ads will have a greater chance of getting back links than pages with ads, and that the backlinks are more valuable in the long run that the ads would be early on. What does everyone think about this suggestion?

My sites don't get much traffic, only ~120 unique this month. Also my CTR is 0.0% so removing ads from my site wouldn't loose me any money. At least for now I think the back links would be better for me.

[KLB]

With only 120 uniques per month, you'll spend more time and effort placing and managing ads than it is worth. I'd recommend waiting until your site establishes its self and has enough traffic for advertising to actually earn any revenue.

[supermighty]

Do you think people will be more likely to link to a site without ads than a site with ads?

[KLB]

Do you think people will be more likely to link to a site without ads than a site with ads?

I think this question is irrelevant. In general, however, I think you would be more likely to get links without the ads. The cavet is and this question is irrelevant because whether or not people link to your site depends upon how good your content is, not whether it has ads or not.

If you have lots of unique compelling content, then people will be more likely to link to your site. If your content is no different than can be found elsewhere or it isn't very compelling, then people aren't going to be very likely to link to your site.

One thing that does help attract links is to solicit links by suggesting people link to your pages on your website.

[WealthStream]

So long as your site offers something useful to visitors, I don't think having one or two tastefully placed ads on your site would affect how many backlinks you get. The key is to know when to stop; people will see your site in a worse light if you have a lot of popups or tacky looking image ads.

It's probably best to limit it to a few discreet text-based ads or affiliate links for the time being, for the sole purpose of experimenting with different placement strategies, and improving your clickthrough rate.

If you do suddenly start getting a lot of traffic, and your clickthrough rate is ~0%, you stand to miss out on a lot of good advertising revenue. It's much better to work on improving your CTR with a couple of ads now, while you are only getting a few visitors a day, and not much is at stake.