Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have one site that got sitelinks, that cute Google innovation which adds up to eight links below the link to your site home page. It's usually seen as a good thing and people are happy to get them, because not everyone does, and they can make your site appear more significant.
From a usability point of view it can save return visitors one click of their valuable time by not having to enter the site from the home page to navigate primary links.
AdSense income on at least one of my sites, however, dropped after I got Sitelinks, because I didn't have AdSense ads on every page, and visitors entered the site from sitelinks to pages without ads. I've added ads to them in some cases, but I still doubt revenue will get back up.
The reason: when your site has sitelinks, users make navigation decisions before they enter your site. Instead of clicking on your home page, and then drilling deeper into the site, and clicking on ads within your site, they've already decided to return to the Google Search Results Page, and enter by a second sitelink.
In that sense sitelinks hijack your navigation and siphon visitors away from your ads.
Google lets you delete sitelinks, fortunately, so you can control some user navigation and entrance paths.
I have another site where I think the Sitelinks actually may have helped revenue, but it needs more investigation to see if there are unique reasons why, e.g., where the order of Sitelinks first leads visitors to pages that have more expensive ads.
Sitelinks show up in Google Results without announcement so you need to watch out.
Google engineers for the SERPs, furthermore, are different from the AdSense Team, and supposedly never consider how their decisions could affect ad performance.
The Adsense Team has never released any public studies to show how sitelinks could affect publisher income positively or negatively.
p/g
In that sense sitelinks hijack your navigation and siphon visitors away from your ads.
Sure, just like Google/Yahoo/MSN search results for inside pages, or "deep links" to inside pages from other Web sites. So what? That's how the Web is supposed to work.
Put AdSense ads on your inside pages, and the problem will be solved. (You may see better ad targeting as a bonus.)
Google engineers for the SERPs, furthermore, are different from the AdSense Team, and supposedly never consider how their decisions could affect ad performance.
As they should be. The user-experience should be everyone's top priority. Revenues are important, but not at the expense of a quality user experience. Once you sacrifice the user-experience for ads, you start to fall towards the spammy side of the spectrum.
Be happy they are providing additional links deeper into your site from the search results.
Then put ads on all your pages like most people do? Don't know what to tell you, you're an outlier in all the positive data.
It may not be as simple as that for potentialgeek, as some of his/her pages may generate a higher epc/ecpm than other pages as do mine.
For instance, I have now keep a single adblock that generates more income than any of my other pages combined. Adding ads on the other pages within my site does not supplement my existing income volume, - so much for "no earnings cap"
