Google offers text links for referral programs

Now you can use text link to refer potential publishers/advertisers to AdWords, Adsense and Firefox.

Previously, the referral formats were limited to buttons, well, not anymore. This is good news but is still not very flexible. The wording of the text links are fixed although the font type and size is fully customizable to match your site font.

But there’s a potential abuse waiting to happen as described by JenSense

While it is nice that the font can be customized by publishers, the fact they allow the font size to be customized did surprise me, since I easily changed the font size so that the sentence took up a considerable amount of the browser window. And bolding, italics etc are able to be used on the text as well. I can definitely see this being abused fairly quickly, and there is nothing (currently) in the policies that would prohibit it, since a publisher would not be changing the ad code to do this.

Read more: AdSense offers text link referral program

Anyway, I think Google should offer more flexibility. One option that I think people would love is to have something like

http://www.google.com?refer=sabahan

and to be allowed to include any text the publishers wanted. Although I don’t think this going to happen anytime soon.