Forum Moderators: martinibuster
That's just too bad to loose such a good opportunity to sell targeted advertising on my sites - i could run AdSense ads on a lot of very targeted, quality vertical search engine results and directory pages.
Is it really impossible ore are they open to discussions about that? After doing some reading here at WebmasterWorld i find that the question is still unanswered / unclear, or!?
RobbieD said in July:
"we run AdSense on all our Search Engine Category Pages and it is working great for us." [webmasterworld.com]
... whereas mack said in June:
"I Run a directory site that was rejected for being search related." [webmasterworld.com]
... and eaden said in June:
If you have 5mil + searches a month google will allow you to put ads on the SERPS [webmasterworld.com].
I wonder who is currently running AdSense or AdWords at a (specialized) directory / search engine and if so, how did you do it? Is it possible to get the ok to display AdSense on serps if you have a high number of searches? If so, how many?
1.) Dynamic SERP's are a no no. These means a user types in a search term in a form box and hits enter. "Dynamic" results are returned based on some search algorithm. The URL contains a "?".
2.) I believe someone else mentioned "gray area" about using AdSense on directory pages. I agree with this is gray area label, but possibly acceptable. I have read several of the responses that users posted from Google. They all seem to mention: "form generated dynamic content". Again grey area...but read the TOS. If there is a directory that is navigated by clicking from one category to another is this a "Search Engine Result Page" by definition? I could be very wrong but I would venture a guess that someone at AdSense would have posted "no directory" sites as well. Or they left it ambiguous on purpose so they could make a judgement call.
I have seen a "good number" of sites with AdSense on directory pages. However, many of these sites had large amounts of real content as well. Many with content integrated in the directory pages. These sites were not just rip offs of DMOZ...etc. It would seem that someone would have posted here if Google sent a "No Directoy Results Pages" letter. Has anyone got one?
Conclusion: "Maybe" it's ok to use on directory pages if a site also offers content other than just the directory...? I do think this is currently a judgement call being made by a AdSense reviewer.
[edited by: nealw at 9:26 pm (utc) on Aug. 24, 2003]
My site gets about 2 million searches a month right now, and growing (usually on the line of 150% - 200% growth per month).
Having AdSense on the search results would be a HUGE benefit - since the static pages are informational / content, and the user is reading info rather than looking/searching. Also, at least 2/3rds of the page views are search results....
The major drawback right now with AdSense is that you can't use it on search results... but I do have some thoughts on the subject:
1) Search results is Google's business. One possible reason they don't allow adsense for SE may be to prevent funding of their competition.
2) Adsense in it's current form doesn't work well for search results. The bot goes to the page AFTER the user visits. There are a LOT of searches users perform that are never repeated. Search results for "dog" vs "dogs" are two completely separate. I have two primary solutions to fix this: a) what I'd do is only output the adsense javascript on search pages that have gotten several searches done in the past. That will prevent unique one-time-only searches from wasting media-googlebot time. Problem with this is it relies on the publisher to function, and requires technical skills. Thus this isn't a solution google will ever accept. b) The second solution is to pass the query string to the adsense javascript. e.g; Right now you pass the colors to the script, so there isn't much problem with also passing the search text to the script too.
3) The "5 million+" option is not an option for niche market search engines. If you check out the output for the "5 mill" option, you'll see it's making the (wrong) assumption that search results are synonymous with web searching. My search engine has nothing to do with the web, and it's content is pretty much unique to my site. As such, Adsense ads are a much better fit than the option available for 5+ mill search, search engines.
As it currently stands, on any given day, my search site makes less than the cost of one value meal at McDonalds. This is ONLY due to it being unable to have any adsense on the search results. No doubt this will force me to switch to any competition of google's the second they appear and allow ads on search results. I want to reiterate that the content on my site is UNIQUE that no other website on the internet comes close to mirroring.
I hope google notices my situation and understands that I am not in a unique situation. I like adsense, and would love to keep it as a permanent solution for advertising on my websites.
PS: I've written three times to google in regards to this, and have only received the standard form reply stating that adsense is only for content pages, not search results.
Put Adsense on your results page and do a few searches that your visitors are searching for. Are the ads relevant?
The only problem with using adsense in it's current form is that it really only works on searches that get high traffic. On a one-time-only search, there is only PSA ads, and then no one else will ever revisit that unique page/search, so the crawl done later by metacrawler will be of no use.
(get example)
[example.com...]
Google can revisit/spider this page via MediaBot. It will take what ever content is on this page and rank it using it's algo. (My site has hundreds of pages listed in google in this format.) If google can visit the page and a user did a search for blue widgets and the serp returns a bunch of "listings/information" about blue widgets...then AdSense will display ads related to blue widgets.
However, if a programmer used the post option it would be impossible for MediaBot to revisit/spider the serp. There is nothing for the bot to follow up on because the search terms are not visible in the url.
As for typing in say "just" blue in the search box (as opposed to blue widgets... I would say most serious websites take this into consideration and return the most targeted results as possible. Assumming it's a niche site your going to returning info in the serp that is still about "widgets" which assuming google can spider the page will return ads for at least "widgets".
