Google predicts the future of the Canadian dollar?
Regular readers may recall that in my second April Fool's Joke, Chitika Declares Invalid Clicks Valid, I had Chitika explaining that their algorithm was wrong, that they had swapped the numerator with the denominator by mistake and were halving clicks instead of doubling them. Apparently someone at Google read it as well.
Or maybe this is just part of the new “Google Future” product they're working on and they're predicting that the Canadian dollar will eventually surpass the US dollar.
This doesn't affect me, I still get paid by cheque in US dollars. (Old habit…) But I'd have been distressed for sure…
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
TheTutorDirect.com: New reader-built site
Nothing earth-shattering to talk about today, just wanted to mention TheTutorDirect.com, a new site from a reader of Make Easy Money with Google. The site offers free online tutoring help and is just getting off the ground. Good luck to Travis on his new venture!
P.S.: I may cut back on the frequency of my posts here while I concentrate on some other writing, so don't be surprised if two or three days pass between postings. Don't worry, the quality will remain the same! I'm trying to get my blog network and my e-book off the ground…
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
How to get a #1 ranking in Google
There are four major ways to get traffic to your site: search engines, links from other sites, feeds (especially blogs) and advertising. Of those four, a lot of effort is spent trying to get a good ranking in the various search engines, especially Google. Why? Because a good ranking is a sure way to get a lot of traffic, and the #1 spot on the search engine results page (SERP) for a given keyphrase is a prime traffic generator indeed. (Well, assuming anyone's actually searching for that keyphrase…)
Some readers I've talked to have expressed surprise in discovering their own page in the #1 position on a Google SERP. “How is this possible?”, they ask, “when there are no links to my page and it has no PageRank?”
There are two fallacies here. One is that the Google “link:” command shows all the links to a given page. It doesn't, it only shows a partial list of pages that meet some unknown criteria. A better way to find out who links to your page is to search for your page's URL while excluding your own site. For example, to find out which pages in Google link to www.memwg.com/blog/adsense I can do this search:
www.memwg.com/blog/adsense -site:memwg.com
As I write this, the search returns about 252 results. Try it here (opens new window).
The second fallacy is that PageRank is required to rank. But PageRank is just one ranking attribute. The lack of PageRank doesn't mean you won't rank. Of course, the higher the PageRank the better — think of it as a tie-breaker for similarly-ranking pages. Also, the PageRank you see reported for a page isn't necessarily accurate. Remember that the Google Toolbar is just presenting a scaled approximation of the page's actual PageRank on a convenient 0-10 scale.
So how do you get a #1 spot in Google? Well, the first thing to do is get the page indexed. You can submit the entire site using the link on my handy Search Engine Submission Pages list, but it usually takes a while for anything but the first page to actually make it into the Google index. The easiest way to get a specific page into the Google index is to link to it from a blog that is frequently crawled by Google. This is why the spammers talk about the “blog and ping” approach, because it gets their spam more quickly into the search engines.
Actually, I lied. Getting it in the index is the second thing you want to do. The first is to do basic search engine optimization on the page based on the keyphrase you're targeting. You know the drill:
- Keywords in URL somewhere, ideally separated by hyphens
- Keywords in title, near or at the beginning
- Keywords in headings
- Keywords near the top of the page
Really basic stuff. Once the page content is optimized, then link to it from a blog.
Will this work for all keywords? Of course not! You have to choose the right keyphrase. One where there aren't a lot of pages in the index already, or where the pages that rank near the top don't highlight the keyphrase as well as you do.
And that's the hard part: getting a #1 ranking in a competitive area is hard. Because you'll be competing against sites with high PageRank. Because you'll be competing against sites that Google views as authoritative. Because you'll be competing against sites that are older (the age of a resource currently plays an important part in Google rankings — if you have an old domain lying around you might want to consider using it to give your content a boost).
One trick that people use is to “narrow” the desired keyphrase by adding one or two more keywords. This can let you grab a #1 spot for the keyphrase and at the same time may get you to rank highly (but not necessarily in the top 10) for the “wider” keyphrase. For example, I have the #1 spot in Google for electronic fence guide. But I also have the #4 spot for electronic fence by itself. (Long-time readers will note the change — the keywords used to be “invisible fence” instead of “electronic fence”, but the lawyers for Invisible Fence made me rename my site to the Guide to Electronic Fence and Pet Containment.)
Don't work too hard at grabbing #1 spots, though. Work on your content, keeping the simple SEO principles in mind. Many #1 rankings are accidental. I'll freely admit that my #1 ranking for blackberry development (for my BlackBerry Development Notes page) is accidental and amusingly outranks Research in Motion's own pages. I got it, though, because I provided some good information on a specialized topic. You can do the same thing!
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Highlight Google AdSense Ads: A new Greasemonkey script
If you're a Firefox user, you may have already heard of the Greasemonkey extension, which lets you run scripts (code) in the browser that control how pages look and behave. One enterprising individual wrote a simple Greasemonkey script called Hide Google AdSense Ads that hides all the AdSense ads on a page. Of course, I would never use that script myself, but a simple change to the script gives us the Highlight Google AdSense Ads script. What it does is find all the AdSense link and ad units on a page:
and wraps them with a large red border:
This is a great way to find cleverly-positioned ads.
Note that the border will probably interfere with the layout of some pages, so I wouldn't leave it turned on permanently. You can download the script from my AdSense-related Greasemonkey scripts repository. Basic installation instructions are at the bottom of the page.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Chitika earnings poll — vote now!
One of my readers reports yet another disappointing month with Chitika's auditing of their eMiniMalls earnings. They lost 50% of their earnings this month. I just checked my own meager earnings and I've lost about 15%, so it's not as bad for me but I'm wondering how others are affected. Please take a minute and participate in the Chitika eMiniMalls Earnings Poll. All you need to know is what your average monthly earnings are (before auditing) and the percentage of those earnings that you lose after the auditing. You can also suggest and vote on ways for Chitika to improve your experience as a publisher.
Calculating monthly earnings is easily done from your Chitika management console. Go to the Unaudited Reports page and select “Last Month” in the date filter:
After you press the “Go” button, scroll down to the bottom and write down the number. Then do the same from the Audited Reports page. Then calculate the difference in earnings as a percentage.
I'll leave the poll open for a week or two and then announce the results here.
BTW, I think Chitika publishers have more cause to whine than AdSense publishers do. Sorry, Nick, but you agreed to Google's payment terms when you joined the AdSense program — they weren't holding a gun to your head or anything… (See Section 11 of the AdSense terms and conditions, it's all spelled out there…)
Localized AdSense content
Last week I was in the United States for a short vacation. Although most Europeans would find it hard to distinguish a Canadian like myself from an American, I can certainly tell that I'm in a different country as soon as I drive over the border. It's not just the stern-faced border guards asking to see your passport (though that's a big clue). Or the strange money (all the bills are the same color!). There are other subtle things, like different speech patterns and idioms (like “drive-up ATM” versus “drive-through ATM”), different street layouts and traffic patterns (the northern Detroit area is full of streets with no left turns allowed, instead you drive past where you want to go and do a U-turn), different banks (is the Fifth Third Bank a merger between the Fifth and Third banks, or the fifth Third bank, or 5/3 of a bank?). Which brings us to today's topic: localized AdSense content.
Localization is the geek term for adapting material for a specific locale, which is a cultural and/or linguistic and/or geographical grouping of humans. For example, the localized version of “localization” in the UK would be “localisation”. You'll often see locales described using language and country codes: for example, “en-US” refers to English as used in the United States while “en-CA” refers to English as used in Canada (and no, they're not the same). Localization affects more than spelling and grammar, however, it also applies to things like date and number formatting (”1,000.00″ vs. “1 000,00″), sorting sequences (do accents matter?) and other things. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a good FAQ on this.
Your blog or website is viewable by a worldwide audience, so you should give some thought to localization. The first think is to decide which language or languages you're going to support. Most sites are in one language only because of the effort and cost required to support multiple languages. For example, I've had requests for a French version of this blog, but I can't see myself doing it anytime soon because the postings I already write in English take so much time to do already, translating them (or coming up with entirely new content) just isn't worth it.
But even with one language there are localization concerns. There are many variants of English in use, for example. There are two general approaches:
- Write for your own locale. This is the simplest choice. You know your own language and culture best. Works well if your readers are primarily from that locale. Or else you write compellingly enough that your audience will figure it out.
- Write for the most popular locale. English sites often slant themselves towards an American audience. I do it, for example, by using American spelling for the most part — thus you see me talk about “color” and not “colour”. (Though I do sneak in the occasional Canadianism like kerfuffle or pogey — so instead of referring to AdSense as “webmaster welfare” I might call it “webmaster pogey”).
But of course, that's without considering AdSense. In theory, you shouldn't be concerned with AdSense at all in writing your content, but in reality we all want to tweak our content so that it attracts the best ads. So keep these important facts in mind:
- AdSense can only be used with certain languages. Originally, you could place AdSense ads on any page, but not too long ago Google tightened the rules. Now the page content has to be in one of the supported languages. If your content is in a different language, you're out of luck.
- The ad inventory varies greatly by language. Remember, the ads you see all come from AdWords, and AdWords advertisers can choose which languages and countries they want to target. This is a good reason why you should use the alternate URL or alternate color feature of AdSense to make sure that those icky public service announcements never show up.
- The words you use affect the ad targeting. Generally speaking, Google's algorithms are smart enough to handle simple cases. For example, “traffic equalizer” and “traffic equaliser” show the same general ads because Google is smart enough to treat “equaliser” and “equalizer” as equivalent. But using the wrong variants might cause you to miss advertisers who are advertising based on exact matches only.
Then there's the whole problem of which URLs to use for your pages. Most web servers support a feature called “content negotiation” which lets the server automatically choose the best version of a web page based on information provided by the web browser. This lets you use one URL to serve many different versions of a page. The problem, of course, is that the AdSense crawler is not going to see all the versions of those pages — it's just going to get the default version. It's better to use separate URLs for the different versions of a page and provide a way to automatically redirect visitors to those pages instead of having the web server do it transparently.
If you have further questions about this, please leave a comment or else send me some mail.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
How gzip encoding reduces bandwidth
Yesterday, Matt Cutts posted more details about the caching that Google's crawlers are now doing to further clarify the whole AdSense push vs. AdSense pull issue. One of things he mentioned was how webmasters can turn on “gzip encoding” to save even further bandwidth. Since not everyone reading this is a webmaster, I thought I'd explain what he meant in further detail.
HTTP Headers
As you know, the HTTP protocol is what a web browser uses to communicate with a web server. The browser (a type of web client or user agent) always initiates the conversation with the web server by sending it a URL. In other words, if you type http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense into your browser to read this blog, the browser sends a request (technically, a “GET” request) to the server located at www.memwg.com for the content located at the path /blog/adsense.
However, a bunch of other information gets sent along with the request: the type of browser being used, the user's preferred languages, the underlying operating system type, what kind of image formats are accepted, etc. (See Masquerading Your Browser for information on how to alter or hide some of this information.) This information is attached to the request as a set of headers, basically name-value pairs of data. You can use my free HTTP header viewer tool to see what headers your browser is sending right now.
Content Encoding
Normally, any data requested by the client is sent by the web server byte-for-byte down the pipe. If you request a web page that is 10,320 bytes long, the web server sends the entire 10,320 bytes to the client. In other words, the data is sent in its “raw” or “natural” form.
One of the headers that a client can send is the Accept-Encoding header, which tells the web server that the client can receive compressed data as an alternative. If the server so chooses, it selects one of the encodings that the client supports (the client sends a list of supported encodings) and compresses the data with the selected encoding algorithm. Instead of sending a 10,320 byte document in the example above, it might end up sending a 4,567 byte long document — a significant savings. (The amount of compression depends on the algorithm being used and the data being compressed. Typically, HTML pages become much smaller.)
When the server encodes data like this, it's the client's job to decode it on the other end back into its raw form. The server actually sends headers back to the client as part of the response, and one of those, the Content-Encoding header, indicates which algorithm it used for the encoding. The client can then decode the data by selecting the appropriate algorithm.
GZIP Encoding
On Unix/Linux machines, the gzip application is used to compress and decompress data. But the term “gzip” or “GZIP” is also used as shorthand for the compression/decompression algorithm used by the gzip application. So when you hear someone refer to “gzip encoding”, they're talking about data that is encoded by the same algorithm used by the gzip application.
A web browser that understands gzip encoding sends an Accept-Encoding header that looks like this:
Accept-Encoding: gzip
The web server encodes the data using the gzip algorithm and sends back the appropriate Content-Encoding header:
Content-Encoding: gzip
The browser then uses the gzip decoding algorithm to return the data to its normal, uncompressed form.
Why GZIP Encoding Helps
The idea behind gzip encoding is to reduce the amount of data being transferred over the network. In the example above, the size of the document was reduced by over half. Not only does the data transmit more quickly, you also get charged less for its transmittal — in general, the less bandwidth you're using, the less you pay.
There are downsides to gzip encoding, though. Any data compression takes time and processing cycles, so a heavily-used web server may find itself slowed down even more if gzip encoding is enabled. And not all data types compress well — images often end up being bigger when compressed — so the server shouldn't automatically compress everything, even if the client requests it. And some older clients have bugs in their decoding algorithms.
Note that gzip encoding is not limited to web browsers, it can be used by web crawlers as well. Browsers and crawlers look the same to a web server, they just have different headers. Matt indicated that Google has now enabled gzip encoding in all of its crawlers. So if you're finding that your site is being crawled excessively by crawlers and using up your precious bandwidth, make sure gzip encoding is enabled in your web server — it could make a big difference.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Why can't Google have normal text referrals?
I'm on the road for a few days without a computer, but thanks to my BlackBerry and AvantGo I can still keep up with what's new in the AdSense world. Just don't expect long postings or a lot of links, these small devices are a challenge to use for blogging.
There are a lot of smart people at Google, but sometimes they just don't get it. When I and other publishers ask for text referral links, what we want is the ability to do something like this:
http://adsense.google.com/?ref=xxxxxxxx
In other words, act like every other referral program on the planet! I don't know why they feel compelled to control the links so closely. Let me place them in plain text emails. Let me encourage people to sign up for AdSense. It's not like there's an immediate payout or anything.
That's all I'll say for now, we're off to the Ford factory tour in Dearborn…
Matt Cutts confirms AdSense publishers not crawled more frequently
In response to a question I left him about the AdSense crawler (see yesterday's posting), Matt Cutts left me the following response:
Eric, I talked about mediabot more today and even made a couple PowerPoint slides. I may post about this more when I get back from WMW, but: pages with AdSense will not be indexed more frequently. It’s literally just a crawl cache, so if e.g. our news crawl fetched a page and then Googlebot wanted the same page, we’d retrieve the page from the crawl cache. But there’s no boost at all in rankings if you’re in AdSense or Google News. You don’t get any more pages crawled either.
In other words, it's just the “AdSense pull” model being used, which is what I thought. This lets them make better use of their bandwidth. Now there's still an open question as to whether or not all the different crawlers Google uses are all storing the same information, as some have reported different results showing up in the Google index depending on which crawler fetched the page. Time for a new question to Matt, I guess!
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Are AdSense publishers being favored with more frequent indexing?
Today I was going to address some of the comments that Stu Drew left about managing to get a high ranking for his private-label rights articles blog entry, but I'm going to defer that to a later time. If you're interested in that topic, let me point you to an article I've written about the so-called “Google Sandbox” that should address some of the questions: Redcowl Bluesingksy: Why the Google Sandbox Doesn't Exist.
I want to talk some more about Google's indexing of AdSense pages. In case you hadn't heard, Googler Matt Cutts confirmed that the AdSense crawler is feeding pages into Google's new “BigDaddy” search indexes. This confirms what others had noticed about what the AdSense crawler (usually referred to as the “mediabot”) is doing. Or does it?
As always, there are different ways to look at what's happening. We know that pages crawled by the mediabot are now making their way into the Google search index. What we don't know, however, is whether those pages are being pushed or pulled into the index. Let me explain.
Let's think of the innards of the Google search engine as a bunch of black boxes. (Disclaimer: I have no special knowledge of how things actually work internally.) For our purposes, we're only concerned with three of those boxes:
- The manager maintains a list of URLs and decides when each need to be indexed
- The crawler (this is the Googlebot) goes out and fetches pages for indexing
- The indexer takes crawled pages and indexes and ranks them using proprietary algorithms
At some point, the manager decides that a given URL needs to be recrawled. It decides this based on age, Google Sitemaps, PageRank, whatever. No one disputes that different sites get crawled with different frequencies, and the manager is the one making those decisions. So it tells the crawler to fetch the page. This won't happen for a while, but when it's done the crawler tells the manager the page has been fetched and the manager then passes the page to the indexer for processing.
Now throw the AdSense crawler into the mix and see what happens. The case that concerns the SEO community is if the mediabot pushes its pages directly to the indexer, bypassing the manager's controls. In this scenario, changes to AdSense pages can potentially be noticed much more quickly than they would through the normal crawling process, giving them an unfair advantage. In this “push” model, the AdSense crawler effectively acts as a secondary manager.
The “pull” model, on the other hand, only affects the crawler. When the manager asks the crawler to get the contents of a given URL, the crawler first checks with the mediabot to see if the latter has crawled the page recently, where “recently” can be any reasonable length of time, say 24 hours. If it does, the crawler just returns a copy of what the mediabot saw instead of going out to fetch the page contents again. The manager is still in control in this scenario — only it decides when a page is to be crawled.
What I've been assuming is that Google is using the pull model, not the push model. Others are assuming the reverse (and the worst), hence the controversy. We need someone from Google to clarify this issue for us…
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Mesothelioma: the one word every AdSense publisher knows?
Mesothelioma. This obscure disease was on my mind yesterday due to a front-page article in The Globe and Mail titled Suffering from a father's job. The article relates the story of a 48-year-old man who is dying from this dreadful form of lung cancer without having had any direct asbestos exposure himself (asbestos is the only known cause of mesothelioma). Rather, he and his family were exposed to asbestos dust brought home by their father's work clothes. Two of his siblings have already died of the disease, which takes decades to manifest itself:
Cases such as Mr. O'Donnell's, once thought to be extremely rare, are starting to crop up more frequently in Canada. There are enough cases that they have been given the formal name of “bystanders,” people who never worked with asbestos yet are at risk of its illnesses.
Please read the full article for the details. It's truly a tragic story.
What struck me about this article, though, was the fact that I already knew what mesothelioma was. Not because someone I knew was suffering from it, or because it's a widespread form of cancer that everyone knows about — it's actually exceedingly rare, though the number of cases is on the uprise as the heavy use of asbestos in the 1960s and 1970s is finally showing its effects — but because it's been touted for a long time as an example of a high-paying AdSense keyword.
Two years ago, I can remember how excited certain publishers were to discover that they could make tens of dollars per click by building sites dedicated to mesothelioma. Of course, mesolthelioma doesn't pay nearly as much these days. Too many people got on the bandwagon. Advertisers (lawyers looking to represent claimants in asbestos lawsuits) smartened up and started to exclude the content network (AdSense publishers) from their advertising. Plus the market got to be so competitive that simply putting up a few pages about mesolthelioma wouldn't get you anywhere in the search engine rankings. (See my high-paying keywords mini-series for more on this.)
It seems odd to me that awareness of such a devastating disease can be so widespread among a community that really isn't affected by it. I don't think mesothelioma is on the same level as Vioxx, say, which I must admit is a keyword I've benefited from in the past. But I was on Vioxx (it's an anti-inflammatory commonly prescribed for arthritis but also useful for other thigns) at the time it was taken off the market, so at least I felt I had some claim to being able to talk about it. And I was able to see some humor in the situation. I can't say that about mesothelioma.
Now, I had a character in my book who was targeting a condition (obesity), but she wasn't out to make a large fortune or anything, just cover the costs of creating a site and providing some good information. More importantly, she was motivated to do it for personal reasons.
And that, I think, is one of the keys to doing well with these kinds of topics. Who are you, a lone individual, to compete against large authoritative sites, or even semi-authoritative ones like the Wikipedia? If you want to go down this path — and I don't think it's for everyone — then look for the personal angle, the story-telling angle. You can't compete on authority or on raw facts. You can, however, make your story a compelling one. Especially if it has the ring of authenticity.
So forget about mesothelioma and other obscure diseases, unless of course you're one of their unfortunate victims. Leave them to the ambulance chasers. I tried being a Vioxx ambulance chaser, but I never made a real go at it because I wasn't that interested in the story as a whole, because Vioxx never caused me any harm. Go for more interesting, useful, and personal content. Something that engages you. Even the most mundane things like talking about your dogs can make you money, surprisingly enough. It's hard to fake enthusiasm and personal experience, and that kind of stuff does show through in what you write.
And my deepest sympathies to those afflicted by mesothelioma, and to their family members.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Google indexes my AdSense URLs? Good!
There's a big fuss going on in the SEO community right now because pages being crawled by the mediabot (the AdSense crawler) are finding their way into the Google search results index. See AdSense mediapartners bot adding to the Google search index and Google AdSense Bot Updating Page Caches for all the details.
I'm not an SEO bigwig, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I have no problems with what Google is doing here. There are really two issues involved:
- Google is indexing AdSense pages
- Google is using information from the AdSense crawler for that indexing
Let's discuss each issue separately.
Google indexes AdSense pages
Let's revisit Google's corporate mission:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Knowing what their mission is — and they've never been shy about stating it — it only makes sense to me that they would scour and use any and all page links they get. I've always assumed that any URL I provide to Google via any means is fair game for them to crawl for their search index. This includes:
- Pages linked to from pages already in the index
- Pages displaying AdSense ads
- AdWords landing pages
- Pages in Blogger-managed blogs
- Pages in Google Pages
- Pages input via Google Sitemaps
- Links in data from Google Base
There are probably other ways to get your page indexed by Google that I've missed. But as you can see, there are many ways to provide Google with a URL. AdSense is just one more input into this system.
And this is good. If I put AdSense ads on a page, the implicit assumption is that I want traffic, I want people to find that page. If they can't find the page, they won't be clicking on the ads. And the page is public — the AdSense terms and conditions state that you can only place AdSense ads on public pages — so it's fair game to be found.
Google uses AdSense crawler data
This is actually what the fuss is about in my mind. The fact that the information obtained by the AdSense crawler — not just the URL of the page — is finding its way into the search index.
The computer scientist part of me thinks it only makes sense for this to happen. After all, one of Google's computers has already spidered the page, so instead of just submitting the URL to the search engine indexing algorithms, it can also submit its view of the page at the same time. Sounds more efficient to me.
Of course, Google has always stated that there's a “Chinese wall” between the search and ad sides of the company so that advertisements can't affect the organic search results. I guess everyone's assumed that this meant that the data returned by the different crawlers wouldn't be comingled. But I don't know why that would be: they should, after all, be returning the same data.
And here's where things aren't so clear cut anymore. The fact is, there are sites out there that return different things for different crawlers. They might return stripped down (mostly text) versions of pages for the Googlebot (the main crawler) but not for other crawlers. Or they might return very different pages for the different crawlers.
But Google doesn't want sites to send it different pages based on what crawler is visiting. They want to see the same page that humans see in their browsers. So from their viewpoint, it shouldn't matter which crawler is doing the crawling — they should all be returning the same data. In fact, using different crawlers to see what's being returned is a good way to flag a site for discrepencies. Google sometimes sends out anonymous crawlers for similar reasons.
Who says rankings are affected?
All we're talking about is the way data gets into the Google search index. There's no proof that pages are ranking any differently because they came in from the advertising side. If there are differences, they're likely because different data is being returned to the different crawlers. I'm sure Matt Cutts will chime in shortly with assurances that the ranking algorithms are unchanged and unaffected by this.
If anything, this whole process demonstrates the continued importance of Google AdSense Tip #1. Make sure your page is right before you give its URL to any part of the Google machine.
Back to work, folks!
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Avoid link units on single-page sites
I've gotten some good feedback on my single-page AdSense site articles, with people like Stuart Drew really taking things to heart. I like Stu's acronym for the “single-page ugly site” which he renames the “one-page ugly site” or OPUS for short. But then again, Bloom County featuring Opus the penguin is one of my favorite comic strips…
Here's another piece of advice for you: if you have an OPUS like No debt is good, avoid using link units on them. I've stated before how horizontal link units can add to the bottom line on most sites, but I think that they're wasted on single-page sites. The point of a single-page site, after all, is to force the visitor to exit either by pressing the back button or by clicking one of the ad links. With link units you reduce the probability that they'll click a money-making link. So I would avoid them.
By the way, pages that have no external links are not as uncommon as you think. Take a look at this page on the history of MS-DOS. No links on it anywhere — to get out you have to use the back button.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Happy Easter, get ready for Christmas
As Good Friday is a statutory holiday in Canada, after church I spent my afternoon doing yard work. After cleaning up some of the tree damage a particularly bad ice storm in February had left behind, I then took down our Christmas lights. Which brings us to today's topic: Christmas.
If you want to cash in on Christmas, now's the time to start your planning. Whether you're building a bunch of single-page sites or a comprehensive shopping site, starting now will ensure that everything's in place in the two or three months leading up to Christmas — the prime shopping season. This is especially true if you're going to depend on good search engine rankings — they take time to get in competitive areas.
If you don't have a topic in mind for your site(s), do some research on upcoming trends. A little digging around, for example, got me this report on handset trends for 2006. No one can accurately predict the future, of course, so there's always the chance that something will come out of left field, but an hour of searching will highlight many possible trends for you to focus on. (You'll want to focus on consumer products, of course, since that's what Christmas is all about. [That sounds cynical, doesn't it?]) Once you've got your list of topics, all you have to do (!) is create your content…
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
How to identify an AdSense professional
Google's Advertising Professional program lets you gain recognition for your AdWords skills, but there's no comparable program for AdSense, and I can't really see them introducing one. What would be the minimum criteria? Here's my list:
- Owns at least one site/blog in each of the following areas: debt help, pharmaceuticals, consumer electronics, and diseases.
- Targeted more than once by click fraud.
- Warned by Google at least once to reword and/or change the layout of pages.
- Refers to SEO professionals by their first name, i.e. Jen, Jeremy, Aaron.
- Experiments with arbitrage and aggressive techniques like images near ads and single-page sites.
- Regularly engages in keyword research.
- Uses other programs like Chitika, YPN, etc.
- Doesn't moan in public about the unfairness of the AdSense terms and conditions.
What did I miss?
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Screw other AdSense publishers for traffic
As I mentioned recently, one way to get traffic is to pay for it through advertising. This is in fact what you do for AdSense arbitrage. But that arbitrage depends on search engine (in this case, Google) traffic and potentially putting some serious money on the line in order to attract qualified clicks. It's not for the faint of heart and something that requires continual monitoring and adjusting, at least in the early period. And especially if you're in a competitive field.
The other approach you can take is to abandon Google search results entirely and lowball your ads strictly on the Google content network, i.e. your fellow AdSense publishers. It's very easy to do. When you create an AdWords campaign, make sure that the Google content network is selected in the campaign settings (it is by default). You can even enable separate bidding for the content network, which is what I usually do.
Now build a large list of keywords related to your topic area. Make it as comprehensive as possible. Set the maximum bid price so low that all the keywords are marked “inactive for search”. This means that they will rarely be shown in Google's search results, though it may still happen — so make sure the bid price isn't too high for you to handle if those ads get clicked. If you've enabled separate bidding for the content network, set a really low bid price per click, say $0.01 or $0.02. Then activate the campaign.
If your topic is competitive, your ad will get a lot of impressions, even at such a low price. Take the “digital cameras” topic, for example. I've got a campaign running right now with a $0.02 bid price and over 1000 keywords related to digital cameras. So far today my ads have been shown over 63,000 times. The conversion ratio is tiny — only 24 clicks, or 0.03%. But those 24 clicks only cost me $0.48. Even a 10% clickthrough ratio on any AdSense ads on my site makes me money in this scenario. And if I can get someone to visit the Amazon Camera & Photo shop
Ironically enough, you're making money off the backs of other AdSense publishers. After all, it's the 1- and 2-cent ads that are being shown on their sites that are making you money. So really, no one else will be thanking you for doing this, not with the piddly payout they get when someone clicks one of your ads. So you really are screwing other AdSense publishers for cheap traffic. (You might want to look into using your competitive ad filter to improve the payouts you're getting, of course…)
And no, you don't have to build MFA (made-for-AdSense) sites to take advantage of this approach. Legitimate sites can benefit from it, too. And it won't work for all topics. Look for highly-searched-for topics with lots of AdSense publishers vying for the ads. Something with a large enough advertising pool to make it worthwhile. Lots of advertisers bid separately for the search vs. content networks, sometimes avoiding the latter entirely — this is what makes the lowball approach possible, but you still need some advertisers on the content network to make it worthwhile.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Review: "AdSense Arbitrage with Cash Cow Keywords"
As a follow-on to Graywolf's excellent mini-series on AdSense arbitrage (the art of buying traffic by placing AdWords ads in the hopes of making more money from the AdSense ads on a site) I thought you might be interested in this review of an e-book on that very topic. The review appeared in the March edition of my newsletter.
AdSense Arbitrage with Cash Cow Keywords
Back in the pre-AdSense days, I remember seeing a lot of ads
for a program called GoogleCash.
You probably remember the ads… a guy who spent his free time
on a yacht in the Caribbean, watching his money roll in… you
didn't even need to own a computer, just access to one… The
idea was simple: buy AdWords ads to promote affiliate products
with big commissions, i.e. spend a little money to make a lot of
money. You didn't have to ship anything to anyone, and the ads
were cheap — usually around 5 cents each. So as long as you had
one or two out of every hundred or so clicks convert into a sale,
you were laughing. Easy as pie, right?
Well, maybe back in 2002 or 2003. Things are a bit tougher now,
and making money from promoting affiliate products via AdWords is
much riskier and definitely more work. But if this kind of thing
appeals to you — spending money to make money — and you have the
time to do it, a new e-book by Roxanne McHenry will appeal to you.
The book is called AdSense Arbitrage with Cash Cow Keywords.
Roxanne is one of the partners of CashKeywords.com, makers of the AdSenseAccelerator keyword tool, which I reviewed previously.
But this e-book is a bit different.
Again, like GoogleCash, the idea is simple enough: you place
low-priced AdWords ads to direct traffic to a site you control
that has high-paying AdSense ads on them. If enough of the visitors
click your AdSense ads, you make money. Since AdSense gets its ads
from the AdWords program, this is really a form of arbitrage, a way
of taking advantage of pricing discrepancies in different but
related markets. Hence the term “AdSense arbitrage”.
Now, I must admit I've tried a little AdSense arbitrate in my time.
Only enough to dip my toes into the water and realize that I
wasn't willing to spend the money or the effort to do it properly.
Because it DOES take money, and there's a good chance you'll not
make ANY money doing it. Not without a system.
This is where Roxanne's e-book helps out. She's been doing AdSense
arbitrage for over a year, and this book describes how she does it.
It's a realistic book, full of warnings that you have to approach
arbitrage seriously if you want to make any money, and warning you
that you can easily lose money if you don't monitor and adjust
things on a daily basis. I like this statement she makes:
“In fact, in my case, for every 10 keywords I tested, 1-2 lost
more money than I made, another 3-4 broke even, another 2-3 made
100% profit (i.e. I spent $5, but made $10 for a $5 profit), and
one was fantastic and made 2-4 times more in profit over what I
spent (I spent $5 and made $10-20 or more).”
And she lists all the cons about doing AdSense arbitrage, including
the fact that you're going to probably lose money in the beginning
until you figure out the lay of the land. And that you want to get
involved in affiliate programs as well, because sometimes you'll
make more money promoting an affiliate product (shades of
GoogleCash!) than via AdSense clicks.
Roxanne's book stands alone in the sense that you don't need to buy
any software to get started — she tells you where to go to get free
information about keywords. She goes into extensive detail about
how to setup your AdWords campaign… I even learned a few things
myself here, such as how to use AdWords dynamic keyword insertion
to automatically build keyword-targeted ads, which I now know is
what eBay uses for its ads (ever notice how there's an eBay ad for
almost anything?).
What I especially like is the appendix that shows an actual case
study she did targeting the phrase “doors”. She walks you through
each step she took. She also goes over a sample budget for starting
an AdSense arbitrage business.
The book's not very long — less than 50 pages — but if this money-making technique interests you, I think it's well worth the $97
price. (She added the cost to the “one time spending” part of her
sample budget, BTW.) I don't think AdSense arbitrage is for
everyone, of course. It takes time at the beginning to get your
system going, and you have to closely monitor your ads from day
to day until you get things right. And each keyword you try is
something new and different. So there's lots of work involved
initially, which will turn off a lot of people immediately. But if
you're willing to stick with it, Roxanne's book will help you make
a success of the project.
So there's my capsule review, probably one of the first reviews
out there. The book includes a bunch of bonuses with it, including a list of keywords and some SEO tips, but buy it for the arbitrage advice more than anything.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
Google can take a joke
Looks like I'm not going to be banned because of my fake press release. Here's what the AdSense team had to say:
Thanks for following up with us on this. We appreciate your humor and
apologize for the warning sent in error.
Mind you, it would have been hypocritical of them to do so given their own fake press release about Google Romance.
Alright, enough about jokes. Back to work everyone! I want to see content! More content!
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
A small AdSense blogging tip
If you're a blogger and you're displaying AdSense ads on your blog, don't forget to view the permalink page for each new blog entry you make. This “primes the pump”, so the speak, by causing the AdSense crawler to come fetch the page so that the first visitor who actually view the blog entry via the permalink page (which will happen when other blogs start linking to it) will see relevant ads. A small thing, but trivial to do — so click the permalink immediately after you've posted an entry and get the crawler to visit.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
The Tyranny of the Blog
Monday morning… what am I going to talk about today? This week? I had my weekend break… except I actually posted on Saturday for some reason two weeks in a row for some reason… Well, it's Monday morning and I haven't been banned yet because of my April Fool's joke, but we'll see what happens today once the people in California wake up. OK, that's a good start, but how long can I drag it out? AdSense support still hasn't responded to my inquiries about it. Sometimes I feel like a daily columnist for a major newspaper… deadlines, deadlines… I guess I'll just keep things as-is on this site until I actually hear from them. If I stopped posting for a few days so I could finish my new book, will anyone care? I guess I have to wait until the fuss from Joel Comm's new edition dies down anyhow. If they don't like my April Fool's joke (and I've heard from some readers who didn't because I made it and the Chitika one … wish I could get a few more referrals… too realistic, sorry!) then I'll have to remove the offending post. My readership's been going up recently, starting to hit a critical mass… would hate to lose that… That's one of the downsides of writing controversial/misleading/humorous material. Good, good, controversy is good, especially when it involves the Big G… You get lots of “link love”, yes, but you can also get some grief from it in unanticipated ways. I definitely don't want to lose those links to my blog, I'm finally starting to recover some PageRank from the domain change I did recently… If you find yourself having to get rid of a posting you made, it's better not to actually delete it. Wonder if Rowse or Jensense have said anything interesting this weekend that I can comment on? It's better to edit the post so that incoming links remain valid; post an explanation of why the original post was removed — it might even generate more controversy and link love for you! This is probably obvious to a lot of people… hard to write a single posting that interests both the pros and the newbies… better slant it for the newbies, they're more likely to make me money… Apparently, though, I've learned how to write good press releases, so I've got a fallback career in PR if Google decides to terminate my account! After all the good I've done for them… not like they seem to care or anything…
In the next posting, I'm going to talk about … what? where's my topic list? how much more can I talk about the single-page site anyhow… maybe directories… no, no… traffic… no, did a lot of that already… hmm… fun with the <noscript> tag? No, hopefully Rowse will print that article I sent him about it… maybe something more about layouts… the different kinds of page layouts for single-page AdSense sites. Don't forget the bio!
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.