Income decreasing when adding other ads or links ?

Anyone else noticed this?

[adrianTNT]

Hello, what do you think about this?

- Does AdSense income decreases when you place more external links on a website?
- When you place ads from other companies?

I think payment per click becomes lower because of external links too. Anyone made experiments with this ?

[martinibuster]

YMMV

Reverse happens, too: Affiliate sales go down after introducing AdSense on a page.

[adrianTNT]

To clarify a bit: I am refering to the way that google calculates the amount it pais, and not to the fact that some users might leave the site through another external link on site and not clicking the google ad resulting in less income thrugh AdSense.

[purplecape]

So you are theorizing that Google keeps track of the external links and builds them into their payout algorithm? Makes sense if so. Might be in the smartpricing algo, though, not the main one.

[adrianTNT]

Yes, something like that.
I am curious if it would be a big impact to remove all my external links and only leave the AdSense ads.
But I cannot test it because I cannot remove the external links for now.

[danielro]

Removing all your outbound links seems unnatural and the web is just not built like that.
Why on earth would goog pay you less % proportional with the number of external links from your site?
Having external links is normal. I don't know about the upsides but I think removing all your external links would raise a flag to the goog bot.
You should spend your time focusion more on user experience and content quality then removing external links...

[adrianTNT]

@Danielro: Maybe linking to the wrong site decreases my site's quality in Google's eyes and get paid less per click.

For example: a software site linking to 10 warez sites would probably be preferred by Google versus a software site with no external links.

Google cannot track conversions for each advertisers so they must be having other ways to calculate a quality of a website and see how much that publisher deserves per click.

[purplecape]

I have to disagree on this point: "a software site linking to 10 warez sites would probably be preferred by Google versus a software site with no external links." AdSense doesn't seem to like warez sites so linking to them might be taking as a sign of poor quality, actually.

But I don't see actually removing ALL external links as a good idea. I think ADDING a lot of links to your site as it is now, if they all go to a rival advertising program, MIGHT have a negative impact.

But relevant external links, and a moderate amount of advertising--I don't think G. would have a problem with that.

[martinibuster]

I am refering to the way that google calculates the amount it pais, and not to the fact that some users might leave the site through another external link on site and not clicking the google ad resulting in less income thrugh AdSense.

When you add unambiguously commercial links to other places where products can be purchased you are siphoning off the best ad clickers. What remains may be less desirable clickers, like tire kickers.

That's one plausible theory of why a click may go bad after adding aff links. However there are way too many variables to assume the addition of links made a difference. I think most people in this forum will agree that earning spikes and dips vary too much day to day to know what exactly is making a difference, except for dramatic ones. For instance, I doubled earnings by adding two more ad units to each article in a section. The reason for an earnings rise in that case is indisputable.

Just my opinion, but I think people assume Google's powers of calculating variables are greater than they really are. There's a mystique around them that inflates their ideas of what Google is capable of doing. Google is capable and technologically advanced, but I don't think they have the power to do some of the things people asssume them to do.