The final articles in the AdSense series I wrote for InformIT.com has been published. The last two articles are about keyword optimization and AdSense for feeds. Here is the complete list of articles:

1. Using AdSense for Content to Rent Ad Space to Google explains briefly what the three AdSense programs are about and then goes into specific detail about the main program, AdSense for content, which lets you make money by displaying Google-supplied advertisements on your sites.
2. Find Money with Google's AdSense for Search Program describes how the AdSense for search content lets you make money by providing search facilities on your sites.
3. Web Ad Layout and Placement Strategies for Maximum Clickthroughs discusses the layout and placement options for AdSense ads on your web pages.
4. Keyword Optimization for Google AdSense describes the basic search engine optimization techniques that can be used to fine-tune content for AdSense.
5. Monetizing Syndicated Content with AdSense for feeds explains what AdSense for feeds is, how it works, and how it allows blog and website owners to profit from syndicating their content via RSS and similar technologies.

Although not strictly part of the AdSense overview series, InformIt.com has also published my article Protect Yourself from Click Fraud, which distills the advice I've given here before about the steps AdSense publishers can use to protect themselves from click fraud.

I hope you find these articles useful and enjoyable, please don't hesitate to send me your questions.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

This is slightly off-topic, but if you look right now at Technorati's list of popular books you'll see that Make Easy Money with Google is first on the list, even beating John Battelle's The Search, an excellent book about the origins of Google and the way search engines have redefined the Internet.

Normally you'd think I'd be thrilled with this, but all it's done is proved to me that Technorati's way of calculating a book's popularity is all wrong. I mean, look at the Amazon rankings for those two books: Battelle's consistently stays below the 500 mark (meaning it's one of the top 500 sellers on Amazon) and mine hovers anywhere between 5,000 and 100,000. (For the curious, see this discussion about what Amazon rankings mean.) Battelle's book is a much broader topic than mine that will interest all kinds of people. Mine's about how to build websites and blogs and make money from them using AdSense. (And, apparently, the title turns some people off because they think it sounds like a scam… but if you read this blog you know it's not…) His book should always be above mine except perhaps in narrowly-focused lists.

The problem is that Technorati is counting the actual links to books on Amazon.com within blog entries as indications of that book's popularity. But the problem is that they count each entry in a blog, not whether a blog mentions the book. So if you have 20 blog entries in a blog that reference the book, that counts as 20 links in Technorati's popularity measurement scale.

The reason my book ranks so highly right now is that last night I was playing around with my blog software (blojsom), doing a little programming to automatically build archives of all my blog postings, which as of today will number 152 since the start of this site back in May. The first archive, sorted by date in reverse chronological order, is now up. To do this I briefly had to turn off the limiting feature of the blog software that limits the number of postings shown on the main blog page to 20 entries. So all 151 entries (this was last night, remember) were showing up. Unfortunately, Technorati's crawler showed up at that time and found all those entries and thought they were all new. And many of them, especially the most recent ones, have a link to the book.

So, thanks to this unfortunate bit of timing, Technorati now thinks that there are over 50 new links to my book within the last 48 hours. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the free publicity, but it's convinced me that it's not a representative list at all if it can be so easily manipulated.

What Technorati should be doing is counting the number of blogs that mention a book, not the number of blog entries that mention it. This would be a more accurate measure. They already do this to some degree. If you look at the Technorati rankings for individual blogs, you'll see that they list both the number of blog entries linking to a particular blog as well as the number of sites linking to that blog, and the rankings are apparently based on some combination of both numbers. They could do something similar when counting the links to Amazon.

OK, tomorrow we get back on topic and continue with the AdSense case study I'm doing. Also, tomorrow's the last day to subscribe to my announcement list to get your chance at winning a free signed copy of my book when I draw a name from the subscriber list on November 1. If you join after tomorrow, you'll have to wait another month for you next chance.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

This is the next article in my occasional Google AdSense Tips series.

The introduction of section targeting lets AdSense publishers fine-tune the content that the AdSense crawler sees in order to better determine the topic of the content and to choose the ads to display accordingly. However, AdSense was already doing a good job in content determination before section targeting came along. No, the real benefit of section targeting is the ability to exclude content, particularly to exclude specific “stop” or “poison” words and phrases that affect which ads are shown on a specific page.

Excluding content with section targeting is simple. At the beginning of the part you want AdSense to ignore, place this comment in the HTML for the page:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

At the end, place this comment:

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

What you may not realize is that you can place these comments right in the middle of your text. Consider the following paragraph:

<p>When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a multiple-personality disorder, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.<p>

As it turns out, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” triggers ads for treatment of narcissism and other psychological problems, which is not at all the topic of this particular content. (Don't believe me? Visit the
permalink page for this tip and see what kind of ads are being shown.) In this context, then, the phrase “multiple-personality disorder” is a poison phrase (not generally, just for this particular topic) that needs to be excluded from AdSense's consideration. This is all you do:

<p>When talking about the author, one has to realize that his references are not symptoms of a <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->multiple-personality disorder<!-- google_ad_section_end -->, but references to a metaphysical concept that few realize.<p>

The AdSense crawler will then skip over the phrase when determining what the main keywords of the page are and selecting the appropriate ads to display.

Note that you can achieve a similar effect two other ways, by using <span> tags to split problem words into multiple parts:

multiple-personality disorder

Or by inserting the offending words into the content via JavaScript:

<script>document.write("multiple-personality disorders")</script>

Neither solution is as good, however, as AdSense section targeting because they affect how search engines see the page in general. If all you want to do is avoid certain ads, section targeting's the way to go.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.