Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'd be interested in hearing the specific reasons for delaying adsense at all. Why would adsense not be shown on a site's first day? What impact does it have if you run adsense on a new site with almost no traffic?
If your site is new and getting almost no traffic, then your primary goal should be to attract quality inbound links that ultimately will lead to better search rankings and traffic.
Your pages will be tastier "link bait" without ads.
Your pages will be tastier "link bait" without ads.
That has probably been the only factor that I take into consideration. I recently launched a niche informational website, for a few months I didn't place ads only because I didn't want to discourage people from linking. The ads haven't paid much yet, I'm debating on taking them off for another few months so that I can pick up some links in the meantime.
Sure, I can distinguish a website where the ad density obscures and outweighs the trivial content, but any ads?
So much fear, uncertainty, doubt, caution, posturing, manipulation - all associated with the act of linking. The WWWWorld's a mad hatter when it comes to linking anymore, thank you Google et al.
Anyone who is so beset by link aversion, attached to the appearance that a website may be attempting to earn its keep and pay its way in this world by ad revenue, is just another hatter in my book. And if that fact alone - the appearance of an effort to pay one's way - is why anyone would choose to withhold their link love then such linkpurists are free to keep their smug little links to themselves.
[edited by: Webwork at 11:44 pm (utc) on April 30, 2007]
Anyone who is so beset by link aversion, attached to the appearance that a website may be attempting to earn its keep and pay its way in this world by ad revenue, is just another hatter in my book.
Maybe so, but he or she may be a DMOZ editor, a librarian, or some other person who's in a position to bestow a useful link (and, like it or not, linking is a fundamental principle of the Web--as it was long before Google's founders invented PageRank).
Let's be pragmatic: A site with "almost no traffic" is going to make almost no money with AdSense, so why use AdSense (or any kind of advertising) until the financial benefits outweigh the potential disadvantages? When your site is established, you can afford to ignore the "hatters" who are prejudiced against advertising in general or AdSense in particular.
'd be interested in hearing the specific reasons for delaying adsense at all. Why would adsense not be shown on a site's first day? What impact does it have if you run adsense on a new site with almost no traffic?
Apart from the "tastier linkbait" as mentioned by EFV, I'm also wondering if it'll have an effect on smart-pricing your account if your site has few visitors.
Apart from the "tastier linkbait" as mentioned by EFV, I'm also wondering if it'll have an effect on smart-pricing your account if your site has few visitors.
Hasn't happened to me yet on one of my new sites, I was getting $1 clicks for one particular area of the site (which was a surprise to me).
I think you have to run sites in two phases:
1) Link building. No revenue.
2) Put the AdSense on and stop any link building efforts. Here is where you make the money.
Adsense is a sign of a poor quality site. Maybe it shouldn't be this way, but it is.
An essential operating principal of hell is this: You are damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Herein lies the hellish dilema for webmasters who envision paying their way by the addition of Adsenee:
I marvel at the seeming screwiness of this Google spawned scenario.
I'd love to see some well constructed market research on whether the presence of Adsense is link antimatter. If that assertion is well supported by market research then Google truly needs to re-examine its position on linking strategies. It just makes Nosense that on one hand it should profit from a product that deters "natural linking" and on the other hand penalize those who find it necessary to resort to methods of linking that are characterized as unnatural.
Am I making sense of the Adsense dilema? If I am then I shall be forced to think of the Adsense Forum as the Badsense Forum because the way things are now structured just make Nosense.
[edited by: Webwork at 11:58 pm (utc) on May 1, 2007]
2) I don't think anyone here is suggesting that nobody will link to your site if you have ads. Some people won't bestow links on you if you've plastered AdSense ads on your brand-spanking-new site, however. And you'll have a better chance of getting the most possible links from desirable sources such as libraries, DMOZ, etc. if you don't slap AdSense ads across your home page on the very first day.
In other words:
If you know you aren't going to earn much money from AdSense since you have "almost no traffic," and if you'd like to maximize your opportunities to get more links and traffic, you should at least consider passing up the chance to earn a few pennies in the beginning. Later on, when you've acquired some legitimate links and earned respectability, you can harvest the fruit of your labors.
Side note: Just the other day, somebody with a new travel site requested a link from me. I looked at the site, saw three AdSense units surrounding the editorial content, and thought "Bingo--another lightweight site that wouldn't exist without AdSense." If I, a for-profit publisher who uses AdSense, can react that way, what kind of reaction would you expect from a librarian, a teacher, or a DMOZ editor?
Also, - this is probably anathema to many- but "adsense reports" is a really quick, convenient way of tracking visitors, especially with the "url channel" feature over many urls. It under-reports somewhat, but it's easier than logging in to the servers and pulling up awstats.
Finally, it gives you a realistic view of what your site is earning and can earn. You don't want to be in the dark, waiting for the great moment when you install adsense, only to be disappointed.
what kind of reaction would you expect from a librarian, a teacher, or a DMOZ editor?
Just a point, and you might believe this or not. DMOZ editors are instructed to ignore Adsense and look for content. If you have so much Adsense that the content is hard to find, well, you can see how that might make the job of looking for content less pleasant, but the ads being there don't matter.
One more thing to consider is the human greed/insecurity in AdSense publishers themselves, it is even harder to obtain a link from one AdSense publisher to another, call it the dark side of AdSense.
A funny thing happened today, I saw and recognized a "built for AdSense" web site that had ZERO ad units on it, I repeat, no ads, yet I knew somehow what this site was built for the moment I landed there, don't ask.
Just a point, and you might believe this or not. DMOZ editors are instructed to ignore Adsense and look for content.
Yes, and DMOZ editors aren't supposed to automatically reject sites with affiliate links, either. That doesn't mean some don't.
Again, it all comes down to the risk-reward ratio. If you're earning almost no money from AdSense because you have almost no traffic, you have almost nothing to lose (and, potentially, a great deal to gain) by foregoing AdSense ads until you've achieved a reasonable level of credibility and traffic--assuming, of course, that your site wasn't created solely as an AdSense platform.
Adsense makes the internet go round. It's so common it's banal. If there's a DMOZ editor who is so purist that they take offense at adsense on websites, then they need to switch off their computer, put on a rainbow scarf, and go join a hippy commune somewhere, free of the evils of modern technology and capitalism.
The offline equivalent would be scorning a newspaper on the basis of it having a classifieds section.
[edited by: Hobbs at 8:19 pm (utc) on May 3, 2007]
This is just nuts.
What the hell is wrong with adsense?
In an ideal world, it wouldn't matter if you had ads on your no-name, unheard-of, waiting-to-get-links-and-a-reputation, almost-no-traffic site. But we don't live in an ideal world.
Every site owner gets to make his or her own decision about when to start running AdSense ads, but it's a decision that should be made carefully and pragmatically. That's all we're saying.
As for the comment about a newspaper's classified ads, it's worth noting that a newly hatched newspaper wouldn't be able to sell classified ads until it had a reasonable circulation.
When you are struggling to get up to 100 visitors a day at the beginning, repeat visitors are like gold. But the most likely way a first time visitor is ever going to become a repeat visitor is if they stay on the site long enough for it to be memorable.
If a first-timer clicks on an adsense link, thinking it to be navigation (yes, you may have painted it a starkly different colour and made it very clear that it is advertising and separate from the content, but that still doesn't mean people won't click on it thinking it to be an internal link) then you may have lost them before they hang around long enough for your site to stick in their memory which might have made it more likely that they would come back in a few days or next week.
Yes, you might say: but that argument could also be used for any outbound links. Well, quite. You might well want to keep a low ratio of outbound to internal links when you are first building your traffic (only to steadily increase the ratio when you have some name recognition and lots more organic repeat traffic coming in) and having genuine OBLs and CPC links at a very early stage might be overkill. (It might not, it depends how sticky your site is).
Taking SE robots into account if I ever have to make a choice between html OBLs and javascript links, I know which I would choose.
These days I'd probably sign up to it ab initio but implement it very gradually, in the past I'd have first got the site to rank before then adding AS, not any more...
Taking SE robots into account if I ever have to make a choice between html OBLs and javascript links, I know which I would choose.
I read somewhere before that robots don't crawl javascript.
If I use <a target="_blank"> then my site won't validate for Strict DTDs. The alternative is using javascript "onclick.popup".
If I exchange links with other websites, how do I:
1. have the outbound link open in a new window, and
2. ensure the link is crawable by spiders, and
3. validates for Strict DTDs
Does anyone have any ideas?
If I exchange links with other websites, how do I:
1. have the outbound link open in a new window
Don't. You'll just annoy users.
