As a (printed) book author, I have an unnatural interest (compared to most of you) in what Amazon does in its ongoing efforts to sell books. Usually that just means fretting over my book's Amazon ranking (see What Amazon Sales Ranks Mean if you're curious) and the comments (mostly good!) by those who bought the book (thank you!).
Still, there are things that AdSense publishers can learn from Amazon in general, though, and that has to do with creating a “sticky” site with few exit points.
Recently, Amazon introduced some new features to enhance the buying experience they provide. First came the ability to tag product entries.
Now they've just added product wikis.
At first glance, these seem like concerted efforts by Amazon to get on the social tagging and community-built content bandwagons, but of course Amazon always puts its own twist on these things.
What Amazon is really doing is providing more ways to attract and keep visitors on its site. If you look closely at one of Amazon's product pages, for example, you'll see that every link on the page goes back to an Amazon site. The only real exception are the sponsored links, which are ads provided by Google:
But even these links first get redirected through Amazon (they can do that because they're an AdSense Premium Publisher) and then open a new window to display the ad.
If you look closely at the tags and the product wikis, you'll see that, again, there's no linking to anything outside the Amazon family. A product wiki page can have links, yes, but only to customer-defined terms on special pages hosted by Amazon. No external links to anywhere, not unless there's some special syntax I haven't found to allow it (I've tried!).
Is this keeping within the true spirit of social tagging? Of wikification? No, of course not. But Amazon is running a business, and it's in their best interest to keep the eyeballs on their site, not someone else's.
As you implement AdSense on your own site, think closely about your external linking strategy. Instead of linking to every site you can think of, minimize the number of external links you have on any given page. This increases the chance that the ads will be used as an exit point from your site (unlike Amazon, your relationship with Google doesn't permit you to keep the visitors you send to advertisers). It may also improve the readability of your pages, because paragraphs full of links can actually be harder to read.
This strategy doesn't necessarily work for all sites. My personal site, EricGiguere.com, is full of external links. I'm not going to change that. But the Invisible Fence Guide currently has none, although I may yet add a links page at the end of the page sequence. Only you can decide what works best for your site, and to some degree that depends on what your monetization goals for the site.
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. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!