Eve, and all,
It's okay to link to commercial sites from your VAGenWeb county pages,
but not those that pay you for, say, each hit or subscriber they get
from your page.
Ancestry has a "search partners" program. You use their script to do a
surname search. A visitor comes to your page, searches on "RUSSELL", and
they are taken to a page listing several files with that name in it
located on Ancestry. But... before they can view any of the files, they
must subscribe to Ancestry, who will then pay the referring webmaster a
set amount for the referral.
It could amount to a lot. Supposed I put a link from the main VAGenWeb
page, or the main Archives page, which has had over a million hits. If
half the visitors subscribed from my referral/Ancestry account, I would
get a hefty check every quarter. I think it's $5 per subscription.
That's against USGenWeb policy.. for a volunteer to have financial gain
for maintaining an official USGenWeb page.
Linda