Clicking Ads by Accident is OK
It happens at one time or another to all AdSense publishers. You move a window around and click another underneath it to bring it to the top and … ooops, you clicked an AdSense ad! Oh oh. In the past I advocated reporting these accidental clicks to the AdSense support team, but apparently too many people are doing it now and Google has officially decreed that accidental AdSense clicks are OK and don't need to be reported.
What this means is that Google feels confident enough in their click fraud detection algorithms to accurately distinguish occasional publisher-generated blips from concerted efforts at defrauding advertisers and/or Google. Note that you should still report suspicious activity to Google, such as pages that suddenly earn you a lot without a significant increase in traffic. Being proactive with Google about these things, and being able to supply information like server logs, ultimately benefits your relationship with the big G. Let's not forget that you're pretty much at their mercy when it comes to anything about AdSense — the terms and conditions allow them a lot of leeway in dealing with publishers who they think are being negligent and/or purposely deceitful. (Really, it goes beyond that. If Google says “Jump!” the only thing you can ask is “How high?”. Such is the nature of the one-sided relationship we publishers have with Google.)
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
AdSense Section Targeting Is Not For Keyword Stuffing
So someone was complaining about the ad targeting on some of their pages. Although this isn't directly related to that problem, when I took a look at their pages I noticed this fragment at the bottom of each page:
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> <font size="1" color="#EFEFEF">gluten, gluten free, wheat gluten, gluten intolerance, gluten celiac, wheat allergy, celiac disease, gluten free diet, gluton, symptoms of celiac, celiac symptoms, celiac testing, celiac nutrition</font> <!-- google_ad_section_end -->
This, my friends, is what is commonly known as keyword stuffing, and it's a bad thing to do. Google in particular frowns upon it.
If you're having trouble with the ad targeting on your pages, do not stuff keywords into an ad section as shown above. Remember that ad sections are hints to Google about what's important about your page and what's not. Any ad sections that are blatantly obvious attempts to sway the ad targeting will be ignored.
What you should do is use section targeting to emphasize the important parts of your content. But even more importantly, you should use natural search engine optimization techniques to make sure that AdSense knows what the page is about. This means using appropriate keywords in as many of these as possible: domain name, page URL, page title, headings, body text, anchor text of outgoing links, anchor text of incoming links. And making sure that the AdSense crawler can read the page in the first place — if you block it, it'll have to guess about the content based on the URL, the other pages in the folder or on the site, and the incoming links. Do this — and do it correctly from the beginning — and you'll see relevant ads. See the section targeting chapter in Uncommon AdSense for more.
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Review: Instant Article Wizard 2.0
In case you're wondering why I've been so quiet these last few days, it's because I've been working on a set of PHP scripts for AdSense code generation as well as some AdSense-ready blog and website templates. I'm thinking of packaging it all up as a low-cost report to be sold via the $7 Secrets system. However, I wouldn't mind getting some feedback on what I'm doing, so if you have ideas for the kind of thing you'd like to see in such a package, please drop me a note.
Anyhow, speaking of Jonathan Leger (the creator of $7 Secrets), he has a new product out, so let me take a break from my product development and review it for you.
Instant Article Wizard: Cut-and-Paste Article Creation
Instant Article Wizard 2.0 (IAW) is touted as an easy way to research and create expert-sounding articles without having to know anything about the topic you're writing about. It sounds fancy, but it's really all about cut-and-paste article creation. Let's see how the software works and then we can talk about its merits.
IAW is a nicely-coded Windows application. It's built around the concept of a project, which is essentially a list of keywords that you want to use to gather seed material for your article. Let's say I wanted to write an article about a topic I know absolutely nothing about, like motocross biking. I'd start IAW and enter “motocross” as my primary keyword and press the Research button:
You can specify multiple keywords in a project, but let's stick with one for now. IAW goes and grabs web pages that contain the keyword and extracts the raw sentences from those pages. It also generates a list of “subtopics” that it thinks are related to the topic and categorizes the sentences into the various subtopics.
The basic idea is to take the sentences that IAW finds for you and select the ones that would work well in an article. Let's select a few sentences to create our introduction:
Here's what our article looks like so far:
Introduction
Motocross (often shortened to MX or MotoX) is a form of motorcycle sport or all-terrain vehicle racing held on enclosed off-road circuits. Motocross racing is one of the most visually appealing forms of motorsports, with riders performing seemingly death-defying leaps, turns visibly at the edge of traction (as indicated by a sliding, spinning rear tire “roosting” dirt at all behind it), and the effort of riders clearly visible as they move their bodies around their motorcycles to balance the bikes for maximum speed.
Now let's go and add a section on the history of motocross. Unfortunately, the first list of subtopics doesn't include a “history” section, so what we need to do is enter a new keyword to the list of keywords and pull in more articles for our research. So I add “history of motocross” and grab more articles, which gives me a new “history” subtopic as well as other subtopics. There were some sentences in the “introduction” subtopic that were about the history of motocross, however, so I drag and drop them over to the “history” subtopic instead and end up with this short section:
History
Motocross is derived from the French, and traces its origins to British Scrambling competitions. Motocross was first known as a British off-road event called Scrambles, which were themselves an evolution of Trials events popular in northern Britain.
By now you have a pretty good idea of how this all works. Once you add sentences to a subtopic, you can move them around and you can split them into discrete paragraphs.
The end result is something that in theory could be a finished article but in reality is the basis for writing your own article. You simply take the entire text of the article you “generated” and paste it into Microsoft Word (or OpenOffice) and then rewrite the article in your own words. Presto, you've got a new article ready to use as content for your site/blog or for submission to article directories.
It Still Takes Time
Let's be clear on one thing. Instant Article Wizard is sold as a research tool for article writing, not an article writing tool per se. The distinction is important. For one thing, creating new articles simply by cutting-and-pasting sentences lifted verbatim from elsewhere is clearly copyright infringement. More pragmatically, they'd also trip duplicate content filters in the search engines. But cut-and-paste articles don't read very well generally anyhow, so after you've done your research be prepared to spend some time rewriting the article into your own words.
I think this tool is useful to some. If you're a skilled writer yourself I don't think it will be much of an improvement over searching for and printing out the top pages about a given topic, reading those pages, and then sitting down and writing an article based on what you've learned. But I realize not everyone can do this, which is why IAW appeals to some people, and the time spent reading and gathering sentences into the basis of an article may indeed be a much quicker process for those people. If you really want to skip the article writing process entirely, however, you should get someone else to write the articles for you.
I have no complaints about Instant Article Wizard. It works well and does what it claims to do. If you need some extra help getting your articles started, it's worth a look.
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.