Adsense and search results

Publishing adsense on search results

[Roomy]

Whilst I understand the TOS forbids your publishing adsense code on search results, I have come across many sites including dozens of forums that publish adsense code on all pages. These same sites provide a topic search function within the forum that produces relevant posts alongside, naturally, relevant ads.

Are These sites technically in breach of TOS?

[edited by: Roomy at 2:27 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2004]

[Orson]

I'm sure many of them don't have permission, but some do. I have Adsense on my search results. I emailed Google, and they gave me the ok after reviewing the site again.

I think they'll let you have ads on internal searches. However, you must ask them for permission first.

My ads aren't very targeted, mind you. Even for the most common searches, I only get about half of the four ad spaces in the column filled. All my other pages get 4 ads every time...

[Roomy]

I guess that given the active policing Google does, if they weren't happy they wouldn't let these sites do it.

[jomaxx]

LOL, dangerous assumption. If you're thinking of doing this on your own site, be sure to ask first.

[Jenstar]

I agree with jomaxx - if you are going to do anything that violated the terms, ASK first.

This is what AdSenseAdvisor had to say on it:
I do know that the AdSense team is currently testing ads on search results pages. At this point, it's only a test with a limited number of publishers - I don't know if or when it will be made available to all publishers. The program policies page is correct in stating that ads on search results are not currently allowed.
[webmasterworld.com...] msg # 5

[Fischerlaender]

Now, as the new TOS are allowing Adsense ads on search result pages, I did some tests and I'm disappointed. There seems to be no correlation between the query and the ads shown by Google. I'm always getting ads which are suitable for my site as a whole, but they aren't relevant for the actual search query.

What are your experiences according to the quality of ads on SERPs?

[Yidaki]

Fischerlaender,

how did you manage the mediapartnersbot's visits? Did you allow him to crawl the queries? If so, how many times did it crawl them? I would assume that it takes at least one visit to get relevant ads.

>actual search query

If the actual query hasn't been searched before with the AS code on the results template and if mediapartnersbot didn't crawl the serp too, how should AdSense detect the theme of the query and deliver relevant ads?

[Roomy]

Using a Mod_rewrite I create spider friendly urls and arrange all my products in hierachical categories. Via an effectively static category page.

That way all my product pages get spidered with Mediabot and a product search delivers the product info page with appropriate ads. It has the added advantage of creating a unique page and Title plus meta description for each product. Keywords are automatically added to each page when I add new product details too. All I need now is to sell more!

[Yidaki]

Roomy, that is cool for your static product pages but totally different from searches that are done by users through their query input.

[Roomy]

Search queries can only return results that are in the product database, So if I search on a keyword or phrase that is associated with a product the results include the appropriate product pages and the relevant ads. Believe me it works!

[Yidaki]

>Believe me it works

I have no doubt. But it's still different from what is called search results. Example: a search engine - a query box - user input - results. That is dynamic not static like a product database or a saved result set.

And your question was Publishing adsense on search results?

[Roomy]

I take your point,I was intending to limit my remarks to site search as opposed to any other.

[Fischerlaender]

Yidaki,

Google hasn't ever crawled any SERP and this isn't possible with my site. I was hoping that Google would do some real time analysis of the page or would at least analye the query string (GET parameters). The way it now works is not very good for delivering appropriate ads on a SERP ...

[Yidaki]

Agreed, Fischerlaender. Real time would be best but that's not possible currenty. So if you don't allow crawls of your search results it's no wonder that the ads are not targeted.

[Fischerlaender]

Thinking about the Adsense technology, it's absolutely logical that it cannot work unless the SERPs were crawled. But how do you manage that with a non-targeted site? I've got a classical web portal and the queries are very broad. So bringing all those SERPs into Google would be classical spamming ... Seems as if Adsense on SERPs is only a useful option for targeted sites.

corrected a misleading typo

[edited by: Fischerlaender at 3:33 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2004]

[Yidaki]

>I've got a classical web portal and the queries are very broad.

The broader the search index and the queries, the harder it will be to get targeted ads. I agree, bringing the results into the google index is cheesy. Why don't you let your serp's crawl ONLY by mediapartnersbot and disallow all other bots? I'll try this with my niche sites and see how it works.

Another problem with the current AdSense setup on serps is: only regulary queries (searched more than once) will make you some bucks through AdSense. The first query will always be untargeted - then mediapartnersbot visits and the ads *might* become targeted if the same query will be repeated later by other users.