Adsense earnings for me have remained fairly steady in the last 3 or 4 months. In order to keep the money moving, I’ve had to work a bit harder and smarter then I used to in the past, but overall the efforts have kept me from going down too bad. Google announced results that indicated that overall their revenues are remaining decent. Compared to other advertising arenas, they’re still golden.
More and more complaints are coming in daily about Adsense earnings being down, and it’s not really that big of a surprise. The overall economy is hurting, so there’s a lot less fat in advertising programs. The only companies that can afford to advertise these days are ones with a positive conversion rate. If they can’t make money buying ads, why do it?
Tags: Google Adsense
Lately I’ve been reducing the number of Google Adense ads I’m running and replacing them with more direct ads. Why? Because for the first time in as long as I can remember, the quality is really, really dismal when it comes to the ads I’m seeing.
Revenues are fading, despite massive traffic increases, and it’s not hard to see why. How many more “IQ Test” ads can people click on before they say “Enough is enough?”
Have people become banner blind?
Google has been at this for quite some time. It’s not hard to imagine that Google ads just aren’t that exciting to the average surfer. Once you’ve seen many of these “landing pages” that are so prevalent in Adsense, you could hardly be blamed for not wanting to click on that many more ads.
“Garbitrage” is alive and well. Most marketers aren’t using Adwords to Adsense anymore, but they’re clearly looking for low cost traffic and then hoping to send it to a closing page so they can get the commission. It’s not really the most effective means of using your website’s traffic.
Of course it’s easier to use Adsense than it is to customize codes, but the custom codes are worth more in the long run, especially if you have any decently trafficked pages on high paying subjects. It used to make sense to slap Adsense up and forget it. Now it would be worth testing offers and seeing what converts. You’re bound to make more this way than the just running multiple occurrences of Adsense.
Tags: Google Adsense
I feel like I can finally put a nail in the coffin of cross-linking websites. Let me be specific, cross-linked, thematically unrelated links appear to push little or no value to other websites. In fact, it’s fair to say excessive cross-linking surely hurts in Yahoo and is very much devalued in Google. Google, as always, seems to be adding to the “don’t” list as far as linking goes.
I don’t really care about the fact cross-links aren’t working anymore. All it affects is the need for a more diverse link-profile for each website on your network. Sure, it’s a bit more work, but it’s a common sense approach you’ll need anyway. Plus, it certainly does look “less spammy” to not present visitors with a giant list of unrelated links on your sidebar or in your future. Of course this kills the business models of many blog networks, but that business model has been sucking wind for years anyway.
Now Google should go one step further and dismiss the “reciprocal link dump” type posts that are so prevalent in blogs. Blogs who are linking to each in a one-to-one relationship for gain get away with it if they do it in a faux “editorial” way.
In any event, another small loophole has been closed.
Tags: Cross-Linking, Google, SEO
Bounce rates are being discussed regularly by SEOs
Apparently SEOs have been having very heated discussions about the concept of “bounce rates” on SEO. Myself, I figured a high bounce rate is meaningless. Consider blogs. Most of the traffic to a blog arrives from a search engine and lands on a single view post. They find exactly what they’re looking for and tend to bounce! It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is or how good your content is. People are using Google to find info. Much of the info they find is easily consumed.
Having a high bounce rate can’t be an important sign of quality in most cases. However, that hasn’t stopped people from arguing about it. Typical of most SEO arguments you’ll read online, there’s an awful lot of supposition and very little in the way of definitive proof.
This particular argument seems to be permanently ended when Matt Cutts comes in and lays it out.
Matt Cutts lays down the law on bounce rates
“Without reading the article, I’ll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like “Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don’t you talk to this nice Google Analytics evangelist who knows about things like bounce rate?” I just don’t even run into people talking about this in my day-to-day life.”
He didn’t even have to read the crap article to know it was bullshit. Hell, neither did I. In any event, the time to consider the “bounce rate” as a be all and end all of search engine rankings has lived a short and miserable life. Lots of high quality websites have high bounce rates and I’m sure there are plenty of people with low quality websites that have low bounce rates. The key is the type of visitor and the type of content. If matched perfectly, MANY will bounce. That’s the nature of modern search engine traffic.
Bounce rate shouldn’t be, and isn’t, a part of the Google search rankings and that comes straight from the horse’s mouth.
Tags: Bounce Rate, Google Algo
Can a blog be useful for SEO purposes?
It can, but blogs are a different animal than static websites, and must be treated as such. A blog is very useful because it provides a website with plenty of related fresh content. Considering many websites don’t have content that changes very often, a blog can be a way of commenting on related news and getting more search engine traffic.
Running a blog is hard work
But one thing about blogs is they take a lot of work to maintain. To establish any sort of quality on your blog requires making well written and cohesive posts on popular topics. If you have the time to update 3-5 times a week, than adding a blog to a website can be a fantastic way to build timely long-tail traffic.
If you enjoy writing, then a blog is something you can easily maintain. You might even have fun updating. When you blog, you “ping” the major blog search services, and they tend to take your content right away. Generally the main search engine indexes will also pull your content in almost immediately. Blogging is a way of telling Google that your website updates a lot, and is “in the know” on your subject.
If you have the time and the inclination, adding a blog to a website that doesn’t update much is a great idea. It will help you stay in touch with customers. It can help improve your website’s credibility. Updating often will give search engines the evidence they need to keep on visiting your website and sending in new prospects.
Problem - You have an old blog in a directory and would like to move it to the domain, replacing your website’s content at the root.
Solution: use mod_alias redirectmatch
Scenario one, you move a blog from /blog/ to the root. Here’s the example code.
RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)/(.*)/$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$2/
Keep in mind this all needs to be one line in your .htaccess. This line tells Apache to send all trafficked destined for the /blog/ subdirectory, and instead redirect it to the old file name at the root domain.
Problem: You want to remove the dates in the URLs.
Solution: change your permalinks structure to /%postname/ only, and redirect the old requests to the new URLs using redirectmatch.
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(?!category/)(?!tag/)(.*)/(.*)/$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$2/
This time you’ll exclude any pages that begin with “category” or “tag” and rewrite any requests for your old page names to the root of the domain, without the date fields included.
This is beneficial if you want to dump the date structure, which creates even lengthier URLs than needed.
The advantage to use 301 redirection is that you don’t have to notify anyone or any search engine that your permalink structure has changed. The 301 will be read by visitors and search engines alike, any links built to your pages will be automatically, and permanently, updated the next time your website is crawled and indexed.
Tags: RedirectMatch, WordPress
It looks like Google has updated backlinks again in the last few days. They seem to running on a pretty tight schedule as far as backlink updates go. At least in the search engine. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) also shows a backlink update, but this one was a lot longer in the making. So far there’s been no sign of an export of visible Toolbar PR, but it’s not like those are ever good these days.
Tags: Google Backlinks, Google Updates
To me it appears Google has increased their strategy of getting users to log into the “internet” and stay logged in. OpenID and OpenSocial as well as Google Friend Connect are all steps in this direction. I’m okay with idea, too, as long as the “anoymous” internet doesn’t disappear completely.
Google has been running the SearchWiki experiment for a few weeks now, and I haven’t been using it. There’s something about the idea of voting SERPs up and down that is quite sitting right with me. I also don’t see the purpose of commenting on SERPs.
I’m sure the reaction from your average web surfer is vastly different, but for me the idea behind this feature is a bit counter-intuitive. I understand why Google would want to incorporate common features like this, but this particular implementation is rife for abuse.
Google has already suggested they may use SearchWiki data to influence SERPs. If they do, you can expect manipulation quickly. It would be nothing for companies to set up “boiler rooms” of “raters” who go and push up their SERPs.
If Google uses it for statistical modeling, fine. Or if they use “massive demotions” to see if a website is crap for a further review, fine. But it just seems like one more place on the internet for people to leave unsolicited and unverified information about a websites.
It’s another one of those products where if people had to pay extra for the feature, they wouldn’t. If Google adds too many of these features to their listings, they’ll end up losing that simple sparse look and feel people are used to.
Tags: Google, SearchWiki
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