And what if the link in the author’s resource box makes sense contextually? For example, if I have something in my resource box that says, “Visit to get the best deals on iPod shuffles.” Obviously, it would make sense for the link to go to a page that sells iPod shuffles! If I had an ecommerce store and I was linking to a page with just iPod shuffles for sale, would that be denied?

There needs to be some common sense applied here. If the eBay listings add to the user experience and the page being linked to isn’t just a spammy eBay page, then it should be allowed.

There has to be a reason why eBay listings are being singled out. I just hope Ezines doesn’t get out of control with these silly rules. If it’s eBay today, it will be AdSense and affiliate offers tomorrow.

Travis

It’s great that the previously mentioned article was removed because it linked to a page which had excessive AdSense advertising and little content, but then we don’t expect ALL articles that link to pages containing AdSense will be removed, because AdSense in itself is a perfectly legitimate form of advertising. And the rules should be applied in exactly the same way to any other form of advertising, for example eBay.

I don’t think there can be any hard and fast rules here. For example, eBay listings can often be more targeted than AdSense, so we might be inclined to give eBay even more latitude than AdSense.

Take a situation where an article about ‘how to find the best widgets’ has a resource box link to ‘find widgets up for auction’ that points to a page containing lots of widgets up for auction. You could argue that’s exactly what the visitor is looking for.

I guess a good position would be to mimic Google and aim for a good user experience. In this case, if the resource box link makes sense in the context of the article, and the destination page delivers on the resource box link promise, then I’d say it’s all good…

Thanks for a reply, good to see that you took action against that site and that you are looking into the eBay issue further.

There is no point in me showing the site in question as I’ve removed ebay ads from it and replaced them with adsense as I wanted the articles to be accepted.

However here is a very similar site.
http://learningmassagetherapy.com/

I am sure you can see that it actually gives a much better user experience than having Adsense Ads all over the site.

That article has been identified, removed and our editors have been trained further on this issue.

As to your specific issue with us not accepting, our Managing Editor is looking further into it.

I respectfully recommend that you share with your readers the URL of yours in question that our editors rejected so that both sides to this issue can be seen by all… otherwise it’s a one sided debate, right?

Please copy and paste as I don’t want to give rubbish sites like that any links!!

How cockeyed is that

Conversions might go through the roof in the future if articles can take readers directly to a sales form.