Forum Moderators: martinibuster
So I came up with the idea of taking some content of my own site, splitting it into several pages, dumbing it down and of course having loads of those lovely, big prominent Google ads. Couple of hours work and an additional income - simple!
However, I don't think I quite have the technique of making a minimal content site with loads of keywords quite right.
My original site has been around a long time, and the FAQ page has evolved quite a bit. What I've done is chopped this page into logical sections, precis the information and pitched it at a lower level than it was. I've ended up with a punchy little site that is pitched at just the right level for most visitors with a few ad blocks, as opposed to a real MFA site.
Help - where am I going wrong!
;) ;) ;)
<snip>
[edited by: Jenstar at 7:43 am (utc) on Feb. 4, 2005]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]
My point is that discussions here have focussed my mind, and I've seen where my site may not be serving my visitors to the best of it's ability. My site contains several hundred pages of information. Whilst some visitors do read the site extensively, the discussions here have made me realise that I needed to provide the information on different intellectual levels - hence doing a "Lite" version of my site.
My post was entirely tongue in cheek - It's not MFA. It's something I think I reaslised I should do some while back, and I was simply referring to what prompted me into action to split the site into two domains at different levels.
I am aware that MFA is against the TOS. The original post was my attemt at being funny - though I now realised I pushed one too many buttons with my attempt at humour. Please realise that I was trying to be funny rather than start a flame war.
I'm changing CMS's just so I can break my 4,000-word articles down into pages. Not "made for adsense," but "remade for adsense."
Let's call that being AdSense friendly, rather than made-for-adsense.
I should probably publish them as a "series" of short articles instead.
More important shorter articles are friendlier to your visitors. It's harder to read a long article online than sitting back in an easy chair. We know website viewers skim more. So it this case AdSense friendly is also viewer friendly
Let's say that I'm writing a travel article about the town of Shelbyville. Instead of having one long page, I might have an introduction followed by pages on the article's subtopics: Shelbyville hotels, restaurants, museums and sightseeing attractions, transportation, entertainment, shopping, practical tourist tips, and so on. Each page has a photo and a navigation table with links to the other subtopics in the article. The resulting article might be longer than if I hadn't broken the article up, but it feels shorter to the reader--and if someone searches Google for "Shelbyville museums," there's a good chance that my targeted "Shelbyville Museums" page will show up near the top of the SERP.
By the way, WIRED News reported a number of years ago on an academic study about scrolling vs. the use of multiple pages on the Web. Readers were shown a long single-page article and an even longer multiple-page article. The single-page article required a great deal of scrolling; the multiple-page article had fairly short pages that required very little scrolling. By a significant margin, readers preferred the multiple-page article. And get this: They actually thought the multiple-page article was shorter than the article that required scrolling, even though it actually contained more text.
By the way, WIRED News reported a number of years ago on an academic study about scrolling vs. the use of multiple pages on the Web. Readers were shown a long single-page article and an even longer multiple-page article. The single-page article required a great deal of scrolling; the multiple-page article had fairly short pages that required very little scrolling. By a significant margin, readers preferred the multiple-page article. And get this: They actually thought the multiple-page article was shorter than the article that required scrolling, even though it actually contained more text.
Interesting! What I'm doing with the "Lite" version is to combine two very long articles that have some crossover into a site that has about 7 pages (not finished the editing yet). I am trying to make the pages a similar length, but with this in mind I'll be working on the precis aspect quite hard!
What is a "problem" is that my partner-in-crime is an academic, and I'm a natural waffler at the keyboard. When we run our writings past each other, they NEVER get shortened - usually bits get added! Concentrating on hacking away at the word count whilst retaining the content is a very good exercise! Having a separate site containing the "Lite" version, as opposed to two versions on one site is much better way to go IMHO.
if you've already got good content then you can really go to town on optimising your pages for SERPS and for Adsense. You will have to wait for the site to get picked up by the search engines and gain popularity.
Yes -I'm aware of this. My original site is no. 4 in Google serps on the main keyword, but it took a while to get there. I will be able to drive some traffic to the new site from the original though.
[edited by: david_uk at 7:40 am (utc) on Feb. 4, 2005]
You will have to wait for the site to get picked up by the search engines and gain popularity.
I redesigned an 8 year old website (my first ever website - absolutely awful) from the bottom up (but keeping the original pagenames/filepaths) with Adsense in mind and to be honest going through the whole exercise not only made the site better from an SEO / Adsense pov but also for the end-users.
I've kept most of my articles to no more than 5 page down clicks and am wondering if when I get to 4 or 5 if I should consider dividing them into two pages. I would find natural breaks when deciding when to divide the pages.
I'm curious as to how long the sub pages are that your are dividing article into. How many words and how many page scrolls down is about right?
Beats me. I don't use formulas; I just rely on my editorial instincts and, to a lesser degree, on what the subject itself dictates.
Still, I do remember an old Web-design formula that said a page shouldn't scroll more than 2.5 screens at the most common screen resolution.
I apply since 2001:
No scrolling on XVGA and greater
Because of this limitations, I have maximal space
for 2 120x240, some times even only for 1 120x240
Sorry if I didn't get the humor.
If you double your page count to show more ads, you're inflating the page views/impressions but not the unique users.
So now it might take twice as many impressions to get one click from that user.
And the advertiser sees their ad CTR go down, and ends up dropping the content network altogether.
Does that make sense, or am I missing something because I'm rushing today?
I suppose to argue the other side of it is that if you break it down into smaller pages, you might get slightly different ads on each section, and maybe convert that unique visitor on the second page with an even more targetted ad that wasn't shown on the first page.
All I know is that I had to shut off the content network for a friend of mine, because there were all kinds of impressions and very few clicks. When there was the odd sale, it took too many clicks to convert to a sale - it just wasn't cost effective.
EPV you are right that you have to use your instincts but your answer gives me a general idea.
I do think I read somewhere that people will scroll down farther now than earlier but I've also read that women tend to skim more and mine is a topic that more women are interested in. So I think dividing some pages might be worth a try on some of my articles.
Hmmm. Come to think of it - the bottom ad always pays quite a bit lower than the top ad.
SO - if we split things into two pages, we'd always be serving the highest paying ads, if I understand the system right.
Now that makes me stop and think about this again.
My totally unscientific criteria is:-
1) It shouldn't look "too long", thus daunting to read
2) The information shouldn't be unnecessarily truncated. Some paragraphs can be long, others get reduced to a bullet point.
3) There shouldn't be too many pages on the site - ideally less than ten, some of them quite short.
4) The new site should overall look easy to read (despite a lot of information there) thus encouraging visitors to read more of it than they might the present version.
As regards CTR, that really doesn't bother me that much. I won't be having more than one banner per page, and I appreciate that the same visitors will click on several pages to get all of the information, lowering the ctr. But I'm more interested in the bottom line cash figure. It's not a commercial site, though clearly I have an eye on how I can monetize it to best effect.
I appreciate the comments made re more visitors not clicking on ads might mean that advertisers pull the plug. I will do what I do already - monitor each banner, and pull it if it doesn't perform.
Oh, and Diamondgirl - my humour is known for being really crap. Just ask my kids!
[edited by: david_uk at 10:39 pm (utc) on Feb. 4, 2005]
You know what the potential downside of this is? If you double your page count to show more ads, you're inflating the page views/impressions but not the unique users.
IMHO, you should design pages to serve the user. If that means more pages and less scrolling, so be it. And if it results in better ad targeting because the page topics are more focused, that's just a nice side benefit.
There are supposedly "optimal" page lengths for search engines (discussed in other forums), which may or may not correspond with the optimal page lengths for readers, but I do know some of my longer pages rank highly, and for that reason I wouldn't want to break them up with readers or AdSense revenue in mind.
I have short, medium, and long pages that rank #1 in Google.
IMHO, page length should be an editorial decision; more often than not, it's dictated by the article's structure and the page's topic.
Agree... this is one case where size doesn't matter :)
I have pages that are from 8k to 80k, all have and continue to rank well within their perspective search.
On the idea that breaking up a page might hurt in the serps. I think I would continue to have the first page linked from the contents page then link the second page from the first. Then the original page should continue to do as well. The second page may get found now and then too, especially if it has a slightly different emphasis. It wouldn’t inherit as much PR though being down one level deeper.
My real reason to do it would be to make the article more readable and it might well help with getting more attention to the ads as well.
In my first message in this thread I mentioned that I need to come up with some new fun and interesting pages for the more casual visitors. I don't think just breaking up articles would do the trick there.
I'm wondering about quizzes or other games that would teach the about my topic at the same time. It would be for people with a different mind set. Surfers who are curious but not ready to read a full article. I've got to get creative and see what I can develop.
My real reason to do it would be to make the article more readable and it might well help with getting more attention to the ads as well.
Precisely. And don't get hung up about PageRank. For a given search phrase, I often find that an inside page of an article does better in Google than the first page does. For example, I might have an article on widgets that's broken up logically into pages on:
Widgets (introduction)
Red widgets
Blue widgets
Green widgets
Search on "widgets," and Google may return the "blue widgets" or "green widgets" page as its first choice, even if the "widgets" introduction page seems more on target and has higher PageRank.
By the way, getting back to the issue of page length, I recently did an article on hotels for cruise guests in a port city; I broke the article logically by subtopic. An introduction was followed by pages about three parts of town (terminal 1, terminal 2, and another area that's often served by shuttles provided by cruise ships).
Later, I did an article on hotels near the railroad station in the same city. The simplest breakdown would have been an introduction, hotels in area A, and hotels in area B. However, there were so many hotels in area A that the page would have been unwieldy and many readers might never have gotten to the bottom half of the page. So I broke the article into an introduction, 3- and 4-star hotels in area A, 1- and 2-star hotels in area A, and hotels in area B. This was a case where both the subtopics and the length of the material dictated how the article was laid out.
What's good for the user is nearly always good for the search engines and for AdSense.
UH - good point. If the page is so long I need two ads then maybe I need to divide it into two pages.
You may just have hit on the ultimate "Rule of thumb" for the question of how much scrolling there should be!
On the idea that breaking up a page might hurt in the serps. I think I would continue to have the first page linked from the contents page then link the second page from the first. Then the original page should continue to do as well. The second page may get found now and then too, especially if it has a slightly different emphasis. It wouldn’t inherit as much PR though being down one level deeper.
I did think of having the two versions on the one site, but as I'm trying to appeal to a different set of visitors I decided that a different domain would probably be a better idea. I'm putting in plenty of links between the two, so hopefully both sites will benefit each other in many ways.
My real reason to do it would be to make the article more readable and it might well help with getting more attention to the ads as well.
Same here.
In my first message in this thread I mentioned that I need to come up with some new fun and interesting pages for the more casual visitors. I don't think just breaking up articles would do the trick there.
I have a page of humourous article and jokes that I've found over the years, and it's proved to be a good idea for several reasons. Firstly, the visitors that come to the site on a search on the topic seem to appreciate a bit of lightness. The humour section (or one of it's pages) gets posted to numerous forums and often gets found by searches for jokes. The section doesn't unfortunately perform that well with adsense, but I do find that a decent percentage of the visitors that stroll in looking for a laugh have a browse around the rest of the site whilst they are there. I'm guessing that I probably convert a few of the visits to clicks somewhere along the line.
