Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos
Well, it's time for one of Darren's group writing projects and I thought I'd throw in a contribution. I don't expect to win, but maybe a few extra readers will discover this blog because of it. So, without further ado, here are the Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos that publishers make:
- Clicking your own ads. This is a big no-no in the AdSense world. No matter how enticing the ad, don't click it if it's on one of your sites! If you accidentally click an ad on your site (it happens) then play it safe and shoot an email off to adsense-support@google.com to tell them about the accidental click. You'll get your hand slapped, but your account won't be terminated without warning. New AdSense publishers in particular should report accidental clicks and any suspicious behavior they see (like huge increases in earnings for no reason) in order to gain Google's trust.
- Telling your friends and family about your site(s). Bragging about your site(s) to your friends and family and you're sure to get one of them clicking ads on your site at random. If they do it enough, you'll get slapped by Google for invalid clicks, even though you're not the one at fault. Be very careful of relatives who bring their laptops to your hourse and use your wireless router for their surfing: any clicks they make will appear to be coming from YOUR computer, so if they click ads on your site(s) you can get in trouble (see #1). Yes, this happened to me
- Writing content for AdSense, not humans. The whole point of AdSense is to automatically provide a publisher with relevant, contextually-targeted ads to display alongside human-oriented content. Google uses sophisticated content analysis algorithms to determine the topic of a given page and return relevant advertisements. In most cases (there are exceptions, unfortunately, and I show you how to get around some of them in my book) you don't need to do anything special to get the right ads to show as long as you're using standard search engine optimization techniques to structure and organize your content — which you want to do anyhow to get good search engine rankings. (The SEO siloing technique works very well.) Write naturally — for humans, not computers — and let Google do its things. Don't forget, it's the humans who click the ads that make you money. If no one's reading your content because it's hard to read, you won't make any money.
- Not testing. I wrote about this before in The One Answer To All Your AdSense Questions. Every site is different and what works for my site may not work for your site. Start with the generally accepted best practices — like following the AdSense heat map — but try different things and see what works (and what doesn't) for you.
- Participating in dubious traffic schemes. Traffic is your lifeblood, of course, because without traffic there's no one to click the ads and make you money. But if you don't grow your traffic through natural, organic means, you'll lose money — the money you spent to get the traffic in the first place (which almost never converts into AdSense clicks) and the money you could have made had Google not terminated your account. (Because traffic schemes are forbidden by the AdSense program policies — you have read those, haven't you?)
Really, the biggest blunder is not reading and understanding the AdSense terms and conditions, which includes the program policies. If you do that, you'll be ahead of 80% of the AdSense publishers out there.
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.
 |
Enjoyed this post? Get free updates by mail or by RSS! |
Socialize This Post (Please!)
Tags
Comments
One Response to “Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos”
[...] Eric over at Make Easy Money With Google And AdSense has a great post about Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos. [...]