Outbound Links Affect eCPM?

[netchicken1]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3565780.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 10:56 am on Feb. 4, 2008 (utc -8)

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Many people who run 'real' websites would be happy to hear of MFA sites losing income over time.

It is a galling situation to see sites with no content and no work ranking above your site that you have worked long hours on developing real content on.

I may have experienced MFA'ism recently when I added 10 links to other articles to my posts.

As soon as the extra links were added the ecpm plunged to record lows. After a few days i realised what had happend and removed the links, the ecpm rose back to normal quite quickly.

I may have breached a ratio of content to links, or just having the offtopic links punished the site.

[Marcia]

I may have experienced MFA'ism recently when I added 10 links to other articles to my posts.

As soon as the extra links were added the ecpm plunged to record lows. After a few days i realised what had happend and removed the links, the ecpm rose back to normal quite quickly.

Now, that is a very interesting observation.

I may have breached a ratio of content to links, or just having the offtopic links punished the site.

A ratio threshold makes a lot of sense, not only for Adsense, but it's a provocative thought where organic search is concerned.

[jomaxx]

I disagree. It has no connection in any way, shape or form to the quality or relevance of traffic going to advertisers.

As for the SERPs, every site is different and this seems like a very poor indicator of anything. You're SUPPOSED to have links on your pages: "content" is hardly the same as "plaintext article". I can readily imagine the pattern and quality of inbound and outbound links being looked at in a sophisticated way for possible indicators, but not the raw number.

[edited by: jomaxx at 7:59 pm (utc) on Feb. 4, 2008]

[ken_b]

Without knowing the site or topic of the OP, I'd say I would suspect it was more likely that it was the anchor text of the outbound links that caused the trouble.

And a few days might not have been enough time for the system to adjust to the changes.

[dibbern2]

My own experience (and I'm sure others) says there's absolutly no effect, especially a negative effect, upon eCPM by the number of outbound links.

But as suggested above, the overall 'quality' of an outbound link -including on/off topic factor, anchor text, and liklihood of a two-or-three party link scam-- now these make sense if you believe in the possibility of a trust factor thats a component of feeds from the advertiser pool. It certainly is at work in the search process; so one might guess its used in AdSense also.

If that is the case, then the whole AS enchilada is much more complex than I ever thought.

I have a feeling you might see a little of this trust factor at work if you use your AdWords account to view your placement in the suggested site listings for selected sites in your search sector.

This is all conjecture, so I won't be surprised if someone has a great arguement to refute my proposition. On the other hand...

[MikeNoLastName]

Did your CTR go down or your PPC? It's very likely your ad CTR simply went down becaue people are ACTUALLY clicking on those other related links and NOT coming back to click on your Adsense links. Makes total sense to me.

[joelgreen]

I think that would be a good pattern for catching MFA sites. A lot of them have almost no content and a lot of links. So it looks plausible to me. Especially if all the links are pointing to external sites.