October 8th, 2007 at 08:34am
Under adsense+ adwords
I tried to use AdWords to drive traffic to my blog, in turn generating AdSense revenue. By now, I know that this practice is somewhat in doubt and Google doesn’t really like it. However, as my blog contains original content, it was probably OK to do so - even Google itself buys traffic, so why shouldn’t I?
But… When I started the experiment, I thought that it would not make much sense. And in fact, this proved true. I can see some search clicks and I can also see increased traffic from them. Also, I can see increased AdSense clicks, which I think are related to the previous AdWords klicks. But: I spent more on AdWords than I got revenue with AdSense. Of course, my experiment has limited scope and my keywords are not very competitive. But all in all, it looks like the AdWords game seems to not work well. However, it is a great way to drive in traffic to a new site. And if it has content and maybe something to sell besides AdSense, then it will for sure make sense.
By Rainer
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:37am
Under adsense+ mfa
I just found an interesting article on MFA (”Made for AdSense”) sites on the web. It basically shares my concerns about this artificial traffic source. Also, google seems to go after it, so it is probably not a business model you would like to pursue if you’d like to stay in business for a longer period of time…
http://www.seonewsblog.com/google-goes-after-mfa-sites-with-adsense-arbitrage
The post tells that a large number of AdSense publishers got banned by Google for using MFA sites.
By Rainer
October 1st, 2007 at 10:53am
Under adsense+ adwords
I have just enabled AdSense inside the picture gallery of my personal site. The gallery is mostly about astronomy, space and some other definitely non-adult themes. As a reminder: AdSense is Google’s program for publishers that enables them to show relevant ads on their site and thus get paid a little bit for their hard work.
When we enabled AdWords, the result was stunning: there were a lot of softcore pr0n ads (or other “soft” adult oriented sites). After quick thinking, the solution was very clear: AdSense, in absence of better information, uses the URL for guessing keywords. And in the URL, there was the term “gallery” (pointing to the gallery module). Now, for Google was everything clear: if it is a gallery, the site must be adult-oriented. And if you know Google, you know that any such matching is based on usage stats. In other words: the average Internet (search) users associates the term “gallery” with adult-oriented material. Do you like some evidence? Sure, just see this screenshot below (click image for a better-to-read hi-res version):
As you can see, the picture was all about technical things, related to space shuttle processing.
Thankfully, Google’s AdSense crawler was quite quick. After a 15 minutes or so, relevant ads begun to appear and the adult-oriented ones were no longer seen. Check yourself and try out today’s relevant ads for that very same page:
http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery-sts120-pic-sts_120_vab_no_mlp.phtml
The bad news, though, is that AdSense seems to crawl quickly only pages that are being accessed. So I now need to either access all of my gallery content or need to life with the fact that for a couple of days people will get, well, confusing ads. I hope, however, that AdSense will crawl the rest of the site now so that this is only a temporary problem. Anyhow, I need to keep an eye on it (if you look at my site, I guess you fully understand why I don’t like these adult-oriented ads to be on it).
If everything else fails, I’ll filter out ads in my AdSense account, but this is only a last resort thing to do, as it is
a) a lot of work
b) prone to error
Issue b) is especially problematic as new ads pop up every day, so you need to keep everything updated - IMHO nothing that you can really manage to do. So it is also in Google’s best interest to keep things relevant. After all, I’d need to remove the ads if I can’t find a way to permanently get such ads out of my site.
In any case, to me it is an interesting find that “gallery” seems to be associated with adult-oriented content for the average Internet user…
Side note: I first found the effect on the gallery home page (at http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery.phtml. Due to the size of that page, I could not create a screen shot. So I used an actual picture instead, where the effect can be neatly shown (see above). It is also noteworthy that other urls clearly showed Google used the URL content for keyword targeting. For example, there is a section on the strut repair done at space shuttle Discovery (on STS-120 mission). These URLs contain the word “strut” in them. Not surprisingly, all ads were about mechanical things. There were other samples, too. So there a clear relationship between the URL and the ads. After the AdSense crawler has crawled the page, actual page content is used for targeting. And it seems to crawl pages rather quickly (well done, Google…).
By Rainer
September 28th, 2007 at 09:26am
Under adwords+ experiment
OK, I could not bid as low as I liked to, but I was able to obtain some AdWords keywords for $0.05 - which also tells me that my keywords will probably not earn that much on AdSense, either 
I’ll run the campaign probably over the weekend and see how much increased traffic and AdSense revenue they will bring in (with the revenue currently being zero, that should be easy to track ;)).
By Rainer
September 28th, 2007 at 09:03am
Under adwords+ mfa
I am now exploring… I just found the term MFA sites, which I have to admit did not mean anything to me. Now I know that it is a site “Made for Adwords”. That means a mostly one-page site that has some content and as many AdSense blocks as possible. The really bad ones use stolen content (easy these days with RSS) but some have original content. Obviously, Google (and advertisers) seem not to like these sites pretty much.
I found an old, but interesting article at
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13432.htm
It talks about using AdWords to power AdSense. Sounds strange to me, but after reading, it may make some sence. But, hey, it’s over an year old, so it probably won’t apply any longer.
Anyhow, the concept seems interesting. I decided to do my own experiment, but in a more professional way. I’ll try to promote my Space Shuttle Launch Viewing blog via AdWords for a day or two - if I can get low enough bids, of course. Then I’ll see if that leads to any AdSense klicks.
By Rainer
September 27th, 2007 at 11:40am
Under Uncategorized
Well, the world is changing. In the past two to three years, I’ve spawned of a lot of activities without any real revenue stream (the rsyslog project, for example). But, of course, there are bills that need to be paid. So in an effort to find new ways of funding activities, I have decided to dig deeper into Google AdSense and similar things. I am almost a novice with Adsense, even though I have to admit I know my way around the web quite well. But paid advertising is definitely something new, challenging and, yeah, also interesting.
In this blog, I’ll record what I do and where I fall short. I’ll share tips on what to do best and also what to not do. I’d appreciate comments from fellow webmasters.
By Rainer
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