Should a site be AdSense friendly or user friendly?

[farmboy]

Over in another thread I mentioned a site that won an AdSense contest had search boxes on the site and was using text to call attention to and encourage searches.

I noticed another practice on that site. On a page about widget machines there is a list of widget machine suppliers at the bottom of the page. But only the name, address and telephone number is provided for each supplier. Of course there are also AdSense ads on the page.

There are people on this forum who advocate making a site user-friendly as that will lead to return visits, links, referrals, etc. User-friendly in this case would seem to call for providing the URL's to those suppliers if not a clickable link.

The fact that this site won an AdSense contest and is being offered up as an example by AdSense reminds me of an article written by Andy Rooney a number of years ago. Discussing his subscription to U.S. News & World Report magazine, he remarked that the placement of the address label always seem to obscure important words on the cover of the magazine. He rhetorically asked the magazine if that was intentional or just because they didn't care - and which would they rather he think?

My question to Google is are you offering this site as an example of a user and web friendly site - the kind of site you'd be proud to have on the first page of your search results? Or is the message that webmasters should focus on building sites primarily for AdSense revenue and forget the whole user and web friendly concept? And which would you rather I think?

FarmBoy

[martinibuster]

There would be something to complain about if that site didn't include the phone numbers for the listings. Then those pages would be useless for anything but clicking on AdSense ads. It's a common "clicka-my-AdSense" tactic to leave out phone numbers. ;)

[jomaxx]

I know of lots of directories that provide name & address info but not web links. I doubt this has anything to do with AdSense. Most likely the site is trying to hoard PageRank by not having too many external links.

The good news: you can still twist this around and try to blame Google for it.

[Hobbs]

farmboy,
The answer to your question is in this recent thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

BigDave:

you are paying attention to marketing. That's never a good plan. I would be shocked if it ever occurred to marketing to run one of those sites by the quality team before listing them

fearlessrick

G has a burgeoning internal bureaucracy, and that's a business killer. One hand does one thing, the other hand does another

Google has not been making much sense lately anyway, so tune out till they get their act together again.

[europeforvisitors]

Should a site be AdSense friendly or user friendly?

If it's "AdSense-friendly" at the expense of being user-friendly, the site owner may be leaving money on the table, because AdSense isn't the only possible source of revenue (and may not even be the best source of revenue) for a genuinely useful site.

[BillyS]

Make it user-friendly and it will be Adsense-friendly.

[farmboy]

...I would be shocked if it ever occurred to marketing to run one of those sites by the quality team before listing them...

Yep, that's probably true.

FarmBoy