Forum Moderators: martinibuster
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Not sure if this should be in Google News or adwords. I guess this forum should really be the one for AdSense questions as it's about advertising.
Also, it seems that the site hangs in IE. Mozilla ( as usual ) works perfectly so use that.
Unlike the exising content targed ads you do not need 20 million visitors to put these ads on your site.
for me this doesn't look like an attractive business case
I'm not running a business, though - mine is just a hobby site. And as someone else suggested, AdSense is largely a way of covering my hosting costs, which I'd never found a way of doing before.
But anyway, while things HAVE settled down now, there are still many instances in which "honest" affiliate programs (and their affiliates) still make sense.
I'm doing very well with certain types of affiliate programs--hotels, for example--and the presence of AdWords banners on my pages (whether from AdSense or from the Tribal Fusion ad network) doesn't seem to have had any major impact on affiliate sales. So, for my site at least, both affiliate sales and AdSense should coexist nicely for the foreseeable future.
The great thing about AdSense is that it lets me monetize pages that normally don't generate revenue. On an editorial site, there will always be pages that help to bring in readers but don't lead directly to affiliate sales.
Articles on cruises are a good example: I don't belong to a cruise affiliate program, partly because cruising isn't a major focus of my site but also because most cruises are sold by travel agencies (which either don't have affiliate programs or pay lousy commissions). Now, with AdSense, an article about a cruise on Caviar Cruises or Rubadub Rhine Cruises can generate revenue directly through AdWords for travel agencies that sell cruises on those cruise lines. This is great for me because it's incremental income. It doesn't take away from my other revenues; instead, it's a whole new revenue opportunity.
Even in the hotel category, where I do very well with affiliate sales, there are countries or cities where my affiliate partners don't represent many (if any) properties. An article on Honfleur or Bergen might be a loss leader in the normal scheme of things. Now, with AdSense, I may actually make a few bucks as a direct result of those articles and other articles whose topics were dictated by editorial, not financial, considerations.
muesli wrote:
but what about an average mom&pop website? eg. a website or discussion board not focused on anything commercial, a site commercially unspecific?
It's going to be tougher for people to make money with AdSense in less easily monetized subject areas, but AdSense still may be a better source of revenue than an affiliate program in many cases. Let's say you have a site about Mormon theology. I don't know if there are any Mormon affiliate programs, but--assuming that there aren't--AdSense could come to the rescue with ads for Mormon books that aren't in Amazon, shelving systems for storing a year's worth of food, genealogical research services, and other products or services that are of interest to Mormons.
In any case, AdSense is easy to try. Put the code on your site and see what happens. If it makes money for you, great. If not, pull the code, and you're no worse off than you were when you started.
Advertisers have shunned forums in the past for several reasons. The biggest reason is CPM payment. Forums get huge amounts of page views and generally have less reach (i.e. more traffic from repeat visits than from large audience).
When paying CPM this is a horrible situation.
Another issues is the quality and content of the site. Forums have a bad rep for being kiddie playgrounds with foul language and the like.
I run an "Ask an expert" forum that is large and growing quickly. The content on the forums is excellent as it is well moderated.
Ad networks have made exceptions to their no forum rule for my site in the past. Their reviews have been favorable without exception.
AdSense, IMO, highlights the best that there is of forums with little of the downside.
First of all, they pay CPC, so no need to worry about paying for impressions of little value.
While there is still the issue of content being vulgar etc, on a well moderated intellectual forum there are some needs met.
On my forums the users talk and ask advice about many things. AdSense has done well in serving well targeted ads.
A user asked about camcorders and got a recommendation. AdSense started displaying ads for the exact make and model discussed and the member was thrilled.
She wrote to me saying "not only did your experts answer my question but I didn't even have to search for the camcorder" or some such.
On another discussion people were talking about trimming their nether regions. Soon the talk turned to the depilation products ads. They marveled at how technology is better targeting advertisements and the ads actually became a point of discussion.
I have already bought a product that was displayed in an AdSense ad. It was targeted at forum webmasters and it was an excellent find (it was an addon that improved email notification of forum posts).
Many of these niches do not have many static HTML pages wherin they are discussed and AdSense would tehrefore find fewer avenues to display those ads.
I think AdSense highlights the strength of forums quite well as they can target the varied subjects well. I think forums help AdSense because there are some keywords that rarely have static pages built about them but often have interactive discussion about it.
My one concern is that AdSense is serving too many ads that are targeted at me, the webmaster. AdSense is spidering my page and because my site uses PHP, MySQL etc and says so I get many ads targeting web developers. Even though web development is currently a very small part of my site.
I wish that with AdSense certain keywords could be blocked in addition to blocking sites.
For example, I do not want to lose a member of my site to another forum over 20 cents. Thus far the forums that have been advertised on my site are small forums and my members generally take a look and don't migrate. But I'd like to have the ability to block ads for forums. Ad well as ads about MySQL etc. Just because my site uses MySQL and states as much (to support teh open source community) does not mean many of my visitors are interested in it.
I do wish there was a better way to "guide" AdSense sometimes.
Is there anyway "Ads by Google" could be removed?
Also, it would be wonderful if there was a choice of adding "_blank" in the Ad Code, as many publishers prefer outgoing ad clicks to open in new window.
Thanks for the help.
I just spotted a site that is not a premium partner, but an Ad sense publisher, and managed to remove the "Ads by Google" statement. After checking the site's code, I noticed that it had the following line removed from the code.
google_ad_format = '120x600_as'; [in case of a skyscraper banner]
The Google Program Policies says that the "The AdSense ad code must be pasted, without modification, into websites". I am wondering if google would be able to track such issues.
And along those lines, why WOULD anyone want to remove the Ads by Google tag? I can understand wishing to receive a commission for referrals (frankly, I think that's reasonable), but given the caché of the Google name (compared to, say "Ads by AOL" :snicker:!), it seems self-defeating to remove the tag.
But that's just me. At 1:36am after a tiring Monday. With just chips and mango salsa for dinner. Argh.
If you edit the code, google might not pay you so thats a silly thing to do!
Not especially after the kind of payout I am seeing ;)
Need Scripts
Firstly I am assuming two things, Adsense will propel new sites to be developed and published faster.
I don't know I was little worried about this, But I have a feel that DMOZ might be started to be abused in the near future.Since there could phenomenal increase in new site submissions in various dormant categories just to make that little extra buck.
I personally have great respect and regard for all the DMOZ editors,one day I would also join the team of DMOZ editors.
But I am looking for responses from DMOZ editors about Adsense program. Could you through somelight on what is happening at your end of editing.
With Regards
Aravind
When a domain name is indexed but an inner site isn't, the inner site displays the ad that would display at the indexed top url.
Also, one of my sites featured information on weather for several cities including Phoenix, AZ and all it display was Phoenix ads.
Plus Google AdSense uses the GoogleBot cache of your site without have to recrawl it.
My take Just don't do anything with adsense code.It's a treasure tove that's not to be touched. :)
cdkrg>>I was thinking yesterday night abt the same idea,of why not block some words from being picked up by mediapartners-googlebot/
It's seems to make far more sense not have certain words picked from the site.I feel this serves lot of people's interests and makes a lot more sense.
What's their TOS say about that?
SN
I don't understand what you mean
But I sincerely feel that's a goood suggestion for GG.It well serve not to have certain general words like this site is microsoft I.E6 friendly,this site is optimized by xyz,sponsored ads by xyz.
I hope you understand what I mean.
Aravind
In addition, You grant Google the right to access, index and cache the Site(s), or any portion thereof, including by automated means including Web spiders or crawlers.
You could take this in one of two ways ;-)
1) This doesn't obligate you to let Google "access, index, and cache" the site in an identical way a Web surfer would.
OR
2) By "the Site(s)"... this implies unfiltered / unmodified access.
Oh, and there's also:
3) Google's well-known dislike for cloaking suggests painful wrath to all who'd dare to cloak.
For my part, I'm tempted to go the low-tech route, and simply add some extra keyword-loaded extra phrases to various pages to help Google along, e.g.:
I'd like to respectfully prod Google into understanding that this page is about travel... specifically, European travel, travel throughout Europe, traveling to Europe, and pretty much every possible Europe-like travel-sort-of-behavior that one could contemplate when booking airfare to the European continent. In fact, if one was ponder, "What are some handy tips I should know about for booking the cheapest flights to Europe and finding some great hotel bargains," I bet Google would kindly come to one's aid by showing relevant ads on the lefthand side of this page.
I wonder if that would get google to stop showing "quit smoking" ads on my blog's travel category? :D (and yes, all because I briefly commented about the prolific smoking in European bars... ack!)
Heck, I'm gonna try it! :D I'll try to remember to report back here what happens :)
ORIGINAL PAGE:
<html><body>
<h1>Great alloy Wheels</h1>
<p>We got loads of alloy wheels, and cool hub caps to sell, and don't really appreciate ads of competitors</p>
<p>by-the-by this site is served using the cool Apache webserver and MySQL database system, but is not about SEO at all and has nothing to do with webmastering and webmasters, although I'm sure AdSense won't realise that.</p>
</body></html>
When mediapartner bot comes by one could serve this:
CLOAKED PAGE:
<html><body>
<h1>Spoilers car mods, neon lights, car audio systems</h1>
<p>Let's see some related ads like for Spoilers, Car audio systems and other car mods. Perhaps even Nitro and engine boosting and modifications</p>
<p>No other unrelated stuff to confuse anybody</p>
</body></html>
Of course I'd hate to have to do this, so I beg for a simple inclusion/exclusion keyword option for each ad display, so I can pull them from a db and serve them right for each page:
googlead?include=spoilers;car+mods;audio+systems&exclude=alloy+wheels;hub+caps
(PS: all fictitious, I'm not active in any of those areas.)
SN
edit: typos
1. Does Google collect information about my site?
We securely collect and store the information you provide us through your Google AdSense online account. We will also crawl your site periodically to serve the most relevant content ads on your site's pages.
Does this mean Google will crawl your website more if you sign up for AdSense? This could help out young websites or website that have trouble being crawled.
Just started Adsense on a few of my sites this morning.
Have been very pleased with the program, except for the following:
1: Most of the Ads are not related to the content on some of my sites.
Looks like G latched onto a word that is mentioned only once on the page. It is serving up Ads related to a word that appears only once in a "Sponsored by..." kind of a link.
For example, let us say one of my sites is about "road runner" and provides hints on how to outrun a coyote. It also has, at the bottom of the page, a statement that reads something like "This site is sponsored by Acme Widgets Company...." Goggle seems to have ignored what the site is all about, and is showing Ads competing with "Acme Widgets Company." Considering that this site is sponsored by "Achme Widgets Company," these Ads that compete directly with the sponsor of this site looks troublesome. Kind of impolite to the sponsors, you know... It would have been bad enough if the Ads shown were just out of context. Having Ads that are unrelated, but directly competing with the nice folks that sponsor this site makes it look real awkward.
2: I was considering to add some of those competitor sites to the filter but there are many companies that compete with Achme Widgets Company, so it is not practical to do so.
3: I think it would greatly help if there was a way to block unwanted/competitor Ads based on keywords/key-phrases. This way, we would have a way to help G serve up Ads that are related to the theme of our site(s), while keeping competitor Ads out without having to list every competitor that is out there.
I like the Adsense program in concept, but if this oddity continues, I may have no options but to hit the pause button while the dust settles. Can't afford to displease those sponsors, you know...
Any suggestions?
For e.x, I have been browsing my pages to see how targetted the ads are, and if I take the main heading of my page and search it on Google, I am seeing a lot of advertisents on Google, but those advertisements are not being served on my respective page. If those ads get fetched on my page, it would become really targetted!
The tag could be kept non-mandatory, thus giving freedom to publishers who do not wish to do this hard work and are satisfied with the targetting.
jsut how we have a META keywords, we should have a META relatedkeywords where I can list all my car modding products, excluding my own. ( to stick with my sample)
Sounds like it's a way to go. And it could be VERY usefull for all sorts of things if widely adopted. For examply for automatic "ehere to go next" agents and plug-ins
SN
Similar to the normal Google adwords option.
>>Can we say semantic web?
Good idea killroy,
It might even teach the Adsense bot/algo some semantics.
This feedback should normally be good quality.
You do not want to spam Adsense as publisher because Google might throw you out for ever.
For example if selling alloy wheels and nitro, but "guide to racetracks" in the related keywords meta.
Perhaps this is something I should bring up with the W3C, as it's not really related to google only.
Even negative keywords could have a place in a general meta tag, like not-related=internet explorer, sponsored by and so on, to remove the fluff text from the semantic landscape.
SN
Way to go, WW.
I took this idea from email address obfuscation to foil spammers crawling for email addresses.
[edited by: danny at 1:09 pm (utc) on June 25, 2003]
I't almost go as far as calling that a bug.
SN
From where I am (Indonesia), using IE, the page will not load at all. Mozilla, no problem.
Have any of you noticed that AdSense ads significantly slow the loading of the pages on your site?
There's a slight lag before the AdSense banner appears, but I haven't noticed any slowdown in the loading time of the underlying page.
I actually like the way the AdSense ads pops into place after everything else is loaded. The ilght lag draws attention to the ad and differentiates it from my editorial content.
