Blog Money & Infolinks Update

Following my initial article on Blog Money & Infolinks, Sarah (from Infolinks), commented on the original article & cast some doubt on the validity of my statements. This would have left many readers in doubt & not knowing who they should listen to? Therefore after running a few more tests & triple checking my results, mainly for Sarah’s benefit, this is now an updated review of Infolinks.

Now before going any further, let me just reiterate my verdict from the last article;

The Verdict On Infolinks

 

For anyone that has unfortunately been banned from Google’s Adsense, Infolinks is an excellent alternative if used wisely & placed strategically on your website or blog. Infolinks will never compare to the likes of a decent affiliates program & to be fair, that is not it’s target audience, however it can very easily match up to the low end earnings of most Adsense users & does so far easier than inserting blocks of adsense code everywhere. Therefore I think Infolinks is worth trying out for most bloggers, but please bear in mind that the higher your monthly visitor count, the more you are likely to earn & the lower your monthly visitors are, the less you will earn. It is simply a law of averages, put any advert in front of sufficient people and sooner or later you will find a buyer..?

Now although I state quite clearly that Infolinks is worth trying & is an ideal replacement for a banned Google Adsense account, this does not mean there are no issues. Therefore the main purpose of this review is to bring these points / issues to the attention of potential users & at the same time hope that if Sarah (from Infolinks) reads this article also, then perhaps she can deal with a few of these issues, which will obviosly benefit everybody concerned!

The Issues:

1. The large amount of java script placed in the head of the webpage, does slow down the loading times. I will accept that yes the page is fully visible, even though the java for Infolinks is still doing it’s bit in the background, but until everything has loaded then the page is not complete! As can be seen in the above image, Infolinks has a total of 7 different pieces of code inserted in the head of the website & yes this does slow down site load times.

Speed Test Results:

Homepage load times without infolinks code

3.47
5.19
3.50
5.27
6.14
6.36
5.12
2.87
3.32
3.22

Average page load without the infolinks code = 4.44 secs

Homepage load times with infolinks code placed in the footer.

10.91
12.42
8.91
9.68
9.16
9.85
7.75
9.8
14.05
8.39

Average page load with the infolinks code added = 10.09 secs

Now I think we can say without any fear of contradiction, that Infolinks does indeed slow down your page load times, but to be fair, so does Google Adsense, Google Analytics & just about any Wordpress plugin that is written in Javascript!

It should be pretty obvious to most people that until Google brought page speed into account as a ranking factor, most of us would not have been all that bothered by a 5 or 6 second delay, especially as the page is fully visible and the delay is purely down to Infolinks code doing it’s thing & therefore doesn’t really adversley affect the end user. But since the Google Gods have made their decree, not only do we the webmasters need to modify certain aspects of our coding, but so now, do the software producers.

2. My second issue is the out of context selection of keywords that Infolinks tends to focus on, as an example see the image below;

Ok call me picky if you must, but I fail to see what plumbing services in Singapore has to do with ” Website Hosting For “, which is the keyword phrase thats Infolinks has undelined !

Furthermore having carried out additional checks it would appear that very often as many as 5 of the 12 allowed links actually refer to Infolinks themselves & not to an outside advertiser.

There are also numerous links to definitions of words, something similar to an online dictionary! Add to all this the fact that Infolinks repeatedly ignores such words as “Wordpress“, “Themes“, “Plugins“, which in anyones view would class as high value keywords, so one cannot help but wonder , as I pointed out in my last article, is Infolinks struggling for advertisers..?

My Updated Verdict

Yes I still think that Infolinks is worth using, although I would advise against putting the code on your homepage. There are code switches available on the Infolinks site, which can be used to turn off Infolinks from certain areas of your site <!–INFOLINKS_OFF–> <!–INFOLINKS_ON–>, these are purely comment codes and do nothing other than switch infolinks on & off as required. Even using these switches and blocking the Infolinks, I still found quite a slowing effect on the home page! My solution to this has been to place the infolinks code at the bottom of the single post.php in my theme, this means that it does not require blocking or switching off for the home page & as a single post usually loads a lot less stuff than a home page, then the few seconds slowing in load times is hardly noticeable.

Steve Nickson | Create Your Badge