Make more from AdSense by removing AdSense!
August 20, 2006
To date, I've talked about the importance of sites based on a tight theme and how you don't want to try and cover a hundred unrelated topics on one website. Smart Pricing does not treat you well when you have unrelated topics on the same site.
However, there is something else that seems to defy logic that will often improve your AdSense earnings:
Remove AdSense from off your pages.
Woah! REMOVE AdSense? How can you make more money FROM AdSense if you REMOVE it?
Ok, that's a bit dramatic. You obviously don't want to take AdSense off of all of your pages. But you do not want to be showing AdSense on pages that show very badly targetted ads, especially if those pages are getting a lot of traffic.
Remember that Smart Pricing takes a number of things into account when figuring out how much you should earn per click, and remember that the conversion rate of your site is one of those things.
If AdSense is showing ads that aren't very relevant to your pages, then the clicks you're getting on those pages are going to be what I call "passive
interest" clicks–clicks that are just out of curiosity and not out of a real desire to buy or a
genuine interest in the product shown in the ad.
The more passive interest clicks you get, the lower your conversion rate will be, since these kinds of clicks rarely result in anybody buying anything. Smart Pricing takes a look at your conversion rate, sees that it's low, and the next thing you know your earnings go DOWN even though you have MORE pages.
On the other hand, if you take AdSense off of those pages that aren't showing good, targeted ads, then the reverse hapens: your conversion rate goes up, Smart Pricing takes note and increases your earnings per click accordingly.
It is very often the case that you will make more from Smart Pricing liking all of your pages than from Smart Pricing liking most of your pages and hating a few of the others.
This is one of the flaws in Smart Pricing. It's not based on the performance of the individual page, but rather on the performance of the site as a whole (and some think it's based on the performance of your entire account).
In a perfect world, AdSense should take note of which pages are performing well or badly, and reward or penalize each individual page's earnings per click and not the entire site's. But that's not how it works, at least not now.
I just read a thread at a popular AdSense forum where a webmaster who gets 70,000 page views a day put AdSense on a section of his site where the ads shown weren't very targeted. He ran that way for a month and although the new section added 15,000 page views a day, his earnings actually DROPPED 20% over the month. Ouch.
So take a day and remove AdSense from the pages or sections of your site that tend to show badly targeted ads, and let it run that way for about two weeks.
If you see that your earnings rise, then goody for you! If your earnings go down, then Smart Pricing either liked those pages for a reason other than the conversion rate (not likely), or your site as a whole is not liked by Smart Pricing, and those pages alone were not the problem.
Lastly, if you put AdSense on a page or a section of your site and the ads showing are not well targeted, look out! Next time Smart Pricing does it's calculation (which seems to happen about once a week), your earnings per click might plummet.
So watch those pages and those ads, and make sure they are helping, and not hurting, your bottom line.
Break up your long pages for more AdSense revenue!
August 19, 2006
I don't usually recommend taking advice given to you on forums. It's been my experience that most forums are full of wannabes who like to spout off advice but haven't really accomplished anything.
There is the occasional exception, though, and I ran into one of those exceptions the other day (which is why I still follow a few forums despite most of the advice being bunk). I loved the idea so much I wanted to share it with you.
If you have long pages, long articles, etc., break up those long pages into multiple pages so that:
- A visitor with an 800×600 screen does not have to scroll to see the whole page.
- The AdSense ads are clearly visible at all times while the visitor is on the page.
- So, for example, if you have a 3 "page" article on the wonders of widgets, break it up into 3 web pages. Make each page fit into an 800×600 browser, and provide "Page 2 ->" and "Page 3 ->" links below the content.
This makes sure that your visitor has maximum exposure to the ads, and more chances to click on something that interests them.
The poster who made this suggestion said his earnings rose $300 a day by making this one change!
Should you buy links to your website?
August 18, 2006
You probably already know that links are one of the most powerful ways to get your site ranked for your keywords.
Other people know this, too, and so many websites have popped up that are selling links, either links from their own site(s) or links from other sites.
So the question comes up, should you buy links from other sites to rank well in the search engines? Now, I'm not going to tell you Yes or No, but I am going to give you the pros and cons of link buying.
Benefits of Buying Links
The benefits of buying links are pretty obvious: you can instantly have a huge volume of links pointing to your website. This will help you rank immediately in MSN, but not in Yahoo or Google. I'll explain why in the next part of the article.
With some of the link buying services you get to pick and choose what sites your links appear on, and which pages they appear on. Personally I would recommend not using a service that does NOT let you do this.
If a service does not let you pick which websites your link appears on, then it is likely that they are just running a link farm and in the end they will get banned and you will lose your rankings.
The other obvious advantage of buying liks is that it saves you a huge amount of time. Rather than having to go through the process of exchanging links (even if you use a fantastic piece of software like SEO Elite that makes this easy), you can use all of that time to focus on building good content on your sites.
Another thing that buying links can do is to get your site crawled, not ranked. If you purchase a PR7 or PR8 link to your site Google will usually come running to crawl your site. Once your site has been crawled, you can cancel the bought link. So it's a short term investment to get your site crawled.
So the benefits of link buying are that it makes aquiring links fast and easy, you get to pick
which sites your links appear on, and it can get your site crawled quickly.
The Down Side of Buying Links
There are, however, down sides to buying links for the purpose of ranking well. The number one down side is expense.
If you buy 250 QUALITY links (meaning that the site is a well ranked site and the page has good page rank and your link is in a good position on the page), you'll pay at least $500-$1,000 A MONTH for those links.
Now, if you're selling car insurance and those links can get you ranked for the keywords you want and you make $3,000 a month because of it–hey, the math is good. But if you're selling children's clothing or some other item where the margins are small and the purchase price generally low, it probably is not worth laying out that kind of cash on a monthly basis.
Another down side is that the search engines do not like the practice of buying links. In fact, they consider it "gaming" their system. So once they find out a site is selling links, that site will usually get banned. That means all of those links that you bought will disappear, and you will lose your ranking.
This may not seem so bad. After all, you can just go buy some more links if that happens, right? Well yes, you can, but with the engines these days it takes quite a while before the links are found and applied to your site's ranking.
MSN is pretty darn fast about applying links to your site, but Yahoo and ESPECIALLY Google are very slow about it. Google actually "sandboxes" links if too many links are discovered too quickly. What that means is Google will wait anywhere from 6 months to a year before applying the link values to your site.
That means that you will have to wait another six months to a year before your second wave of purchased links are applied, and in the mean time your ranking will drop.
Another question to ask yourself is this: if the engines don't like the sites that sell links, will
they take action against sites they find out are buying them? No solid answers on that one from the SEO community yet, but it's a question worth asking.
Summing it all Up
So to sum it up, buying links can get you a huge quantity of links quickly and easily, but it is very expensive and there are risks involved. Compare that to building links naturally, where the
links will stay put for a long time to come and are in no danger of being discounted by the search engines. But it's a much longer, more tedious process.
So you decide.
Have I ever purchased links for my sites? Yes.
Is it a regular practice of mine? No.
But your goals and my goals may be different.
P.S. SEO Elite is a fantastic piece of software that makes it easy to get a lot of reciprocal links fast, and I highly recommend it.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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