Google Depenalization Paying Off…
It looks like my Google depenalization efforts are paying off. As of today, The Unofficial AdSense Blog has jumped up about 700 spots in the search query for adsense, putting it at about #46 in the list. I’d still like it to be higher, but I’m much happier with that positioning.
Now the question is, will depenalization affect the other pages on the site as well? Currently none of the other pages shown any PageRank, despite the home page having PR 5. PageRank values in the Google toolbar are not updated on a daily basis like search engine results are, so it may be weeks or months before the site’s “real” PR values get reflected externally.
I’m still looking at what to do with affiliate links, though. There are differing opinions about them.
Hopefully the depenalization means more AdSense publishers will find this blog and subscribe to it… I’ve seen a recent jump in subscriptions to the feed, actually, I wonder if it can be attributed to the depenalization…
AdSense and Google Knol
I’ve been playing around with Google Knol a bit over the past few days, just getting a lay of the land and such. Knol is kind of a cross between Squidoo and Wikipedia, letting users submit articles on pretty much any topic that others can edit and/or comment on (if the authors allow it).
My first impression of the Knol homepage was “uh oh, spam city” because of the topics of the featured articles: cancer, diabetes, and other ailments. Typical fare for a low-quality info site, in other words. But a closer look showed that the articles were actually high quality, written by medical specialists. And there were no ads on those articles, so money wasn’t the motivation for writing them. (Well, maybe Google paid them… but they weren’t MFA articles.) It sounds like Google rounded up some people beforehand to write quality articles for the site.
Still, this is an AdSense blog, so let’s get to the topic everyone’s interested in…. How do you make money with Knol? The obvious answer is through its integration with your AdSense account.
When you register with Knol, you have the option of associating your AdSense account with your user profile. You must do this explicitly, even if your login is the same as your AdSense account login, and you’ll get an email from Google asking you to OK the association. Once you do that, your AdSense info is passed to Knol. There’s some kind of review that happens at this stage, which may take up to 2 weeks to happen. If you’re approved (I wonder if they’re looking to keep out obvious spammers) then AdSense ads will appear on any knols you author and the clicks will go straight to your AdSense account.
Knol has an unfair advantage over other revenue-sharing info sites. Unlike those sites, you don’t have to share your AdSense revenue with Google, since of course they already make money from every AdSense click no matter where it happens. Presumably this is going to make Knol more appealing than Squidoo and other place that take a cut of the AdSense revenue to support their business model.
Expect to see spam show up on Knol, of course. I know of at least one person who’s released a tool to automatically submit articles to Knol. All links on Knol are “nofollow”, however, so from an SEO perspective getting links from Knol to your sites won’t do you much good… but they may still be good for traffic. And then there’s the revenue-sharing…. there’s definitely some appeal there for the shadier types.
What I’m really interested in seeing is if Knol pages get high rankings in search engine results the same way that Google favors Wikipedia pages. Given that everyone’s talking about Knol, presumably there will be a large number of natural links pointing to the Knol site to give it good PageRank. Will that be enough to overtake Wikipedia in the long term? Guess we’ll have to wait and see….
Google Lets Advertisers Combine Keyword and Placement Targeting
AdSense publishers are part of what Google calls its “Content Network”. AdWords advertisers can choose to place ads on the content network, but previously they had to choose between keyword-targeted ads — ads triggered based on the content of a page — or placement-targeted ads — ads triggered based on the domain/URL of a page.
Google is now letting advertisers combine both types of targeting. This lets you effectively target specific pages of a large, multi-topic site by keyword instead of having to list off all the URLs on that site that match your criteria.
It’s a nice feature for advertisers and will make the content network more appealing, which is good for us.