TNX.net is a text link ads service similar to Text-Link-Ads, but works in a slightly different way, where you can buy and sell points to have your text link on another website. Since most of my readers are mostly publishers, I decided I should write a review in a publisher point of view.
First of all, eventhough bloggers are just ordinary everyday people, they still want to work with the best. Seeing the “Beta” text does not turn me on, but it shows that they are still improving their systems, design or functionality. I would like to break this review into 3 parts: Design, SEO and Link Advertising
Design
The overall design is very Web 2.0, but checking the main page with Yahoo’s Yslow, the main page has a lousy score of 59. The main reasons for the low score are the 27 Css background images, no expires headers for files and no gzipping of css and js. Using CleanCSS on HIGH setting, TNX.net stylesheet dropped from 13.095KB to 9.861KB. The css file did not pass the validation, but there were only 2 small errors, which can be corrected easily.
Eventhough they have used 27 background images, I was shocked to see that they have included some images using the old school <img href=”…” /> method. Without alt tags and using tables within a CSS layout, there is no chance that they could have passed the validation. A total of 62 errors should not be in a professional firm’s website. If I had designed the website, the website would load 3 times faster with less CPU load and less bandwith.
SEO
Going through some of the key phrases like “text link ads”, “text link advertising” or “link advertising”, I was unable to find TNX.net on the SERPs. This means they really need to do a SEO campaign. I would highly suggest an analysis of Google Analytics results.
They are also missing META tags, which is the first step of Search Engine Optimization. TNX.net should really consider adding a description and keyword metatags including the above mentioned keywords. Looking at their robots.txt, they have blocked Googlebot from listing their main page.
Link Advertising
TNX.net is based on points, which you can earn by serving more pages including the TNX code get using their very easy to use sidebar. You can post on this DigitalPoint thread with your TNX id, you can earn 5000 TNX points. One of the things I liked was how their system rewards the pages with high Google PageRank. So if you have a website with lots of high pageranks sub-pages, you can quickly increase your TNX points and sell them to other members with an average of $0.60 per 1000 TNX points. You can also select the pagerank of the pages that you want your text-links to be served on! Of course the prices increase as the Pagerank increases. Your earnings are sent to your PayPal account which is a plus. I really don’t like waiting for checks especially when you have to pay for the mailing fee.
Overall, I really like TNX’s system for buying text-links. I highly recommend it to people with lots of high pagerank pages since you can benefit more of the system.
.
