Adsense On Content Thin Pages

[Spyder_Cat]

I am considering adding a question and answer section to my website, with one question and answer per page.

The answers may be quite short, along with an image if appropriate.

I would then show only one adsense ad per page below the content. The content will mostly be above the fold.

Whilst this content will be quite thin (not many words), it will be unique and it will answer a question a visitor may have. Would such a format violate Adsense policy?

I have been through the Adsense Policy guidelines today and can't find anything on pages which have limited content.

[jpch]

I don't ever recall seeing a recommended word count from AdSense for original content. I'd try to have at least several sentences in each answer though if you decide to do this. I'd definitely put the ad below the content and only one ad like you describe.

[hannamyluv]

I have a similar feature on my site and had it reviewed by an AdSense advisor and she did not alert me to any issues with the pages. I took from that conversation, that it was ok. I actually have 3 blocks on those pages, but they are mostly below the fold - the sidebar one peeks up just above the fold.

From an SEO perspective, I block search engines from these thin pages though. I have several 1000 pages like this and I consolidate the questions and answers together on other pages that are crawlable so that the content is more robust.

[netmeg]

One of the requirements of AdSense is that your site follow the official Webmaster Guidelines:

[support.google.com...]

Take a look under "quality" and make sure you will not be breaking any of the rules there.

Frankly, one question and answer per page does not sound like very high quality. Bottom line is whether or not it's worth risking your account over, and only you can decide that.

[hannamyluv]

Frankly, one question and answer per page does not sound like very high quality.

It is not as bad as you might think. It is done for the user's benefit. A user posts a question and expects to be able to get back to a specific page to read the answers. It is really no different than a forum post and no one fusses about putting adsense on those.

[webcentric]

Good grief. There are tons of websites out there that do this. In some cases, it's almost impossible to find an answer due to all the ads on the page. And some of these pages rank exceedingly well in the SERPS and many are littered with the maximum amount of Adsense ads. Google has policies but it doesn't mean they enforce them (or are even capable of enforcing them) across the board. IMHO, a page that's 99% ad space and no content above the fold is a violation of the Terms but if the owner hasn't gotten caught yet, then they're making money. That doesn't mean that they're not susceptible to getting booted out of the program at any moment that G decides it's had enough. I don't have a problem with many of these type of pages as long as they don't play the game of making me find the content. I would focus on being good to your audience but there's evidence out there that treating your audience like click robots is also effective until you get caught and booted. What the OP suggests sounds very conservative given what others are actually doing these days.

I avoid putting ads on thin pages and noindex pages like this on my site (using overview pages to get people where I want them). Noindexing a bunch of pages like this recently gave the rest of my main site a nice bump in the SERPS not too long ago so there's validity to that strategy.

[avalon37]

If you've had an AdSense account in good standing for over a year you will be totally fine.

[hannamyluv]

I would focus on being good to your audience

I think that is the crux. You can have 3 sentences on a page and as long as they are original, easy to find and what the user was looking for, you have a quality page in the eyes of the visitor (which is who we are suppose to be optimizing for, right?). Yes, it may not rank but that does not mean it is not quality.

Poor quality pages are pages that fail to easily provide what the user was looking for. That has nothing to do with length.

[Spyder_Cat]

Thanks for the replies they have been useful.

Currently some of my websites pages use server side includes for the header, footer, and ads, with content hand coded onto its own page.

However, other sections of my site have a content management system, in which content is put into a database, and output to a template using modrewrite to make the pages url more friendly.

I prefer the first method of doing things.

However, given there could be thousands of question pages perhaps putting this content into a database is the only way to manage them, particularly when it comes to tinkering with adsense ad placement?

[hannamyluv]

perhaps putting this content into a database

I would (and do). Databases make it so much easier to manipulate information like this. I don't know what your sources of the Q&As are, but you may find in the future that people find them more useful grouped rather than individual. A database setup would allow you test a wide range of ways to group or ungroup Q&As.

[webcentric]

Well, databases are outside the scope of this thread but I'll just say that with a db you can do all of the following (including discontinuing the use of url rewriting if you like).

1. Easily store your questions and answers
2. Add fields that hold custom ad code for each question and answer if you want that level of granularity.
3. Store a page stub for each question and answer.

The page stub can be used to query for any q&a set. It's not as fast as using a unique integer for a primary key but with a few thousand records it should be efficient enough. Get into millions of records and you'll experience some problems so scope is certainly a factor.

So, if you have a record in your db that is something like

ID = 1
Stub = "how-to-core-an-apple
Question = What's the tastiest way to core an apple?
Answer = Eat all of the apple except the core.
AdCode = Any ad code you want to put here.
Other = Any other types of information you want to attach to this subject (map coordinates or whatever)

When the user goes to mysite.com/questions/how-to-core-an-apple

Your page simply looks up "how-to-core-an-apple" in the db and spits out the appropriate page info.

Of course, you need to run security checks on the query term before using it but that is certainly another topic for another board.

[webcentric]

but you may find in the future that people find them more useful grouped rather than individual

I sense the reason for the OP's original line of inquiry may be related to how some people search these days, e.g. typing a full question into a search box -- "What's the tastiest way to core an apple?" or "What is the latitude and longitude of x?"

Building pages to answer specific questions is a very astute strategy move IMHO. It's how people think and there are some major sites out there that are fully aware of this approach. There's no reason why it can't work on a smaller scale though too. One of my sites does this for a very specific question and I regularly see traffic with that question in the query (for what queries I can see anymore these days).

Added: I'll add that I search this way quite often and am totally happy to find a page with nothing but the answer on it. All the advertising doesn't bother me except when there's no answer on the page or it's so buried that I'm liable to accidentally click on an ad in order to find it. That's where usefulness goes out the window in my way of thinking and I'll often make a mental note to avoid the site in the future.

[Spyder_Cat]

Thanks again for the input.

Yes Webcentric that's exactly the reasoning behind this section. From my stats, I've noticed that's how people sometimes search for things and I've also started doing it too.

In the past I would have considered single Q and A pages spam like. However, if the page gives the user what they want in a fast concise manner, and the page isn't littered with ads, then why not?

Another of my concerns is over optimisation. Having the name of the question in a url, in the page title, in a page header, in a description etc may flag up a few filters.

If I take the approach of not allowing these pages to be indexed then I don't need to worry about this.

However, my plan was to allow indexing of these pages.

I should also be mindful that enough content is written so that adverts are contextual.

[hannamyluv]

my plan was to allow indexing of these pages

Then you really will want to look to consolidation and a sub-domain. My Q&A site accidently sunk my main site a few months after Panda first hit. I had just launched it with questions we had archived in email on a subfolder. 1 question and its answers per page. And *BAM* traffic vs Panda crash. It was not pretty. The whole site lost massive traffic.

I had to reorganize the whole thing. Moved it to a sub-domain, blocked any Q&A page that did not have a certain word count and then reorganized the questions by specific topic (a question can only appear in one topic) so that they could be displayed and crawled as groups. You still get the benefit of people finding the page based on specific questions (bonus hint, look up how Google treats anchor tags on pages) and they can find additional information on the topic as well. That is what search engines want, you provide the answer and something extra.

The individual pages are still there for the person who asked the question. They can easily find what they are looking for when they come back.

Anyhoo, long story short, be very, very careful about how you launch thin content wholesale on your site (it sounds like you are like I was with lots of potential pages to initially start with). You could end up sinking the whole site.