Banning Big Name Urls from Adsense

[lcampers]

I am seeing a lot of big-name urls posting ads on my adsense.

Some of these urls have their own categories in webmasterworld, they are so big.

Another one is the biggest auction site on the Internet.

Another is a huge travel/advertising - write your own hotel reviews website.

I think that while their budgets are huge, these websites aren't paying as much as smaller businesses for a simple click through am i right?

Should I ban them from my adsense and have only small businesses?

Or are their brand names enough to draw clicks and I shouldn't worry about it.

Thanks

LAN

[crick]

A lot of people are blocking out Ebay ads because they pay so little.

[mzanzig]

Why don't you just try it for a few days?

And while you're at it, why not post your key findings here? :-)

Re. eBay - I have been blocking them for a long time with only positive results. You have to be cautious, though. Blocking eBay.com will not result in the ads disappearing. Most of the ads use re-directs, i.e. the target URL (which needs to be blocked) is not ebay.com! You have to use the preview tool in order to find out which URL to block.

[Nitrous]

Do they actually directly sell a product or service? Dont ban them. If they dont then they are just your competition no matter how big!

[mzanzig]

Nitrous,

Do they actually directly sell a product or service?

It is not always easy to determine that by looking at the site, and I would like to ask for your insights in this.

For example, is a flight reservation system that is just an Affiliate without any content or product whatsoever, is such a site "selling" something? Or are they just sophisticated MFAs?

PRO ("They are MFAs")
+ Splatter gun approach for advertising
+ Not fulfilling the order directly (someone else does)
+ No relevant content on landing page
+ Often no direct contact for end consumers provided
+ The whole site is basically on big advert

CON ("They are not MFAs")
- Serving customers with a relevant service
- Creatig the impression that they sell a product
- No advertising to be seen on the site

What do you think?

[Nitrous]

Selling flights. legit buisiness because airlines dont sell direct and these companies add value. Ie online booking, schedules etc. I wouldnt block them. The ones I do block are sites that display ads, lists of aff links or pictures of products that are just referal links.

Another good indication. Do they have a real contact telephone number?

Or do they have a legit looking landing page and then link to other sites full of ads or other pages full of ads.

If they survive on ads they are bad fot your visitors/your income I think.

[lcampers]

Cool... I just blocked example.com, example.com, and example.com, all three were showing up many many times with irrelevant ads

i have nothing against those sites, it just seems that they wouldn't pay much for the ads they were showing (ie example.com shows ads for pretty much every single keyword - ex. buy every single keyword on example.com!)...

and the click-thrus were probably paying very little, if anything.

i hope i can get more relevant ads put on by smaller businesses (and more revenue) - that way they can get the traffic they are interested in and i can get the money for sending it to them...

i'll post findings? it probably won't show immediately but maybe in a few days?

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:44 pm (utc) on April 13, 2006]
[edit reason] Let's not build a blacklist over here. [/edit]

[spaceylacie]

Even if it's a week or 2 later, a follow-up would be nice. You can just post a link to this thread and mention that it's a follow up if this thread gets moved down and you just want to post a follow-up with your findings. Like some here, I don't block any ads. But, I'm always interested in seeing data from people who do things differently than myself. Don't change anything else if you want to see somewhat accurate results from your test.

[wgca]

"You have to use the preview tool in order to find out which URL to block."
What do you mean by that? I want to block them too so how do I find the longer URLs?
I've started blocking some too, especially cheesy links such as 4freeblahblah.. seems to be going okay so far, still testing though. Will share my findings as well :)

[Nitrous]

Use the tool.
Check every page with ads from canada us and uk.

Tick the box on every find.
Choose display urls.
Copy the root url only to your filter.
Not www
Not widget.root.com
only root.com
Not root.com/othercrap

You only want the root.com bit! If theres a dot ignore it like the 1st example. dump the widget bit.
And everything after the slash.

Block stuff that does not sellproducts or real services directly, or has no phone number or is covered in ads.

[lcampers]

Well it's only been 3 days but my clicks are way up and my income is way down... i will check in with more details after another week or so