"Links" pages and Adsense

Are they a shoot in your own foot?

[Gusgsm]

I am setting a CMS managed site (Drupal) about a software product for a very tight and specific market. I want to set there a page with a tiny dayabase with links to related products, techniques, firms and the like.

My Adsense-wise question is: Do these kind of pages have sense from the click-paid advertisement point of view? Will (Might) this generate more clicks or will I be sucking myself potential clicks by serving links that in the end will be free clicks instead of Adsense clicks?

Do you have any opinion about this kind of pages? If so, any advice on how to face them?

(Background: the subsite pages form a reference handbook about using this piece of software and include examples of working techniques. It's a heavy duty industrial product for graphic arts)

Thanks a lot :)

[dhiggerdhigger]

I would suggest that if your Links database is good content, people will come to your site to use it. It's another ways of drawing them to your site to get your ads in front of their eyeballs.

Any reason to get users back for repeat visits seems to outweigh your free-links concerns.

I'm an Adsense newbie but perhaps this is a sensible comment.

[Hobbs]

very sensible comment indeed.
The internet is built on "free clicks"
Think useful to your visitors, profitable will follow.

[ann]

Isn't there something in the TOS about breaking terms if ads are placed on link pages?

Ann

[Hobbs]

don't think so ann

[Gusgsm]

No, Ann. I have reread carefully now the don'ts in my TOS and I don't see anything like that. But thanks for telling anyway.

dhiggerdhigger remark seems sensible to me too.

Thanks all.

[Publisher]

I think the links page is basically a search engine question. It's my understanding that Google doesn't penalize you for links pages, but they don't index them either.

[europeforvisitors]

Google does index directory pages (i.e., pages of links).

[oregon]

My site is a directory and it has thousands of outgoing links. Using the ideas I learned from this group, my income has grown over the last few months to just under $100 per day from Adsense.

I struggle with removing the links and just having contact information. I'm sure that would increase my income becuase there would not be so many ways to leave my site. But I know that the reason I have the visitors I do is becuase they like what the site offers.

To increase my revenue, I'm adding new directory pages and working on ways to add content pages. I will also start looking at other income sources.

[JollyK]

I've had good luck with my links/directory pages. Each category page has an explanation of what sorts of things are linked there and why you might be looking for them. Adsense does wonderfully on those pages.

JK

[laertes]

I'd suggest testing the directory page with and without adsense. If you are using Drupal's adsense plug-in, you set it so that it will not show on certain pages. (Admin>Blocks>Configure)

[ken_b]

I've got some links pages that do very well with Adsense, and others that do terribly.

Pretty much the same story as any other pages that could have Adsense on them.