SEO Tips & Information

Since the Google Panda update, traffic on my network of software sites has dropped by a factor of 3. Whereas once I was getting upwards of 10,000 page views a day, I’m now averaging under 3000. Adsense has been badly hit. Once upon a time I was earning enough to pay the mortgage, now I can barely afford a pizza a week.

By their very nature, PAD sites contain a lot of content that is identical to that on other sites. There are hundreds of PAD-enabled websites and the content on a lot of these sites is identical. I used to spend a lot of time filtering spam and writing backend admin software to help me remove submissions I didn’t like or that were obviously looking to get keyword-based backlinks. Typically, only 10% of submissions would make it live on my sites. Even with all this work though, the content was still the same as on 99% of the other PAD sites out there.

Even worse, the Adsense income has dropped by a greater proportion than the traffic. It’s as though Google doesn’t want to give my sites high paying ads anymore. I’ve got a few friends who run PAD sites too and they’ve been seeing the same drop in traffic and income. We’ve all been scratching our heads to see how we might recover. Writing unique content isn’t an option - we’d never get paid back for the amount of work required.

One thing I have noticed is that a new site I’ve been working on for a year has started to do much better in SERPs even though I’ve built almost no links for it. There’s only one difference between this PAD site and the others though - the site has no Adsense. With my other sites, I took great care to put as many Adsense ads on each page as I could, as well as to optimize the layout of the ads to increase the clickthrough rate. I’m guessing that Google may have hit MFA sites harder than most in the Panda update, so I’m going to remove two thirds of the ads and see if the traffic improves. Hopefully, if the traffic improves I may get more clicks on the remaining ads.

Adsense Optimisation, General SEO

Earlier this month Google announced a beta rollout of some changes in Adsense. From April 2009, some Adsense-enabled websites will be taking part in a new interest-based Adsense allowing ads to be more targetted to the user/ browser. As the year progresses, if the beta is successful, interest-based advertising will be applied to more websites. As yet there’s no list of which websites are being included in the beta. I know a friend who has a high-traffic site, with several thousand page views a day, has been emailed by Google asking him to update his privacy policy, so perhaps Google is only including high-traffic/ high-earning sites in the beta.

The way interest-based advertising work will work is that if a browser visits sports websites for example, then when a shopping site is visited, any Adsense on the site might be geared towards sales of sports clothes and shoes. If users are seeing ads more closely aligned with their interests then they might be more tempted to click on the ads so both Google and the site owner get more advertising income. The internet user also gets to see more of the things he likes.

The downside of interest-based advertising is a small loss of privacy. To make interest-based advertising work, Google needs to track the sites you visit and store this information in cookies on your PC. All browsers provide options to delete cookies and browsing history. When this happens, the interest-based advertising will be back to square one until a sufficient browsing history can be built up again. Most users however, simply don’t delete cookies so Google will have a good opportunity to build up a record of a lot of people’s browsing history. For those of us who want to delete the trail of where we’ve been with our browsers but still take advantage of interest-based advertising, we can install a special plug-in that prevents the Google cookie from being deleted as well as letting you control the kinds of data Google tracks.

Some people will no doubt be paranoid about Google collecting data. The reality is that this kind of data has probably been available to Google for a long time. More and more people now have a iGoogle login or have the Google toolbar installed giving Google the opportunity to log browsing data every time a site is visited. This latest interest-based advertising simply shifts the game from an opt-in scenario to an opt-out scenario, i.e. you’re going to get tracked unless you decide to turn the feature off using Google’s preferences manager plug-in.

As an opt-out scheme, interest-based advertising might sound a bit scary but the reality is that the non-internet world has been running an opt-out trend tracking scheme since credit cards were introduced. Every time you shop at Sainsbury’s or order stuff online, the seller and credit card company get access to a ton of data covering what you purchased and where you purchased all nicely tied up with your name and home address. Google are unlikely to gain access to anything like such a rich pool of data and will only be able to tie up browsing trends with browsers and not specific people. Hopefully, with interest-based advertising Adsense users can look forward to better ads and increased income.

For tips on making the most of Adsense, see Adsense Optimisation.

Adsense Optimisation

If you’ve got Adsense on your website, you might have wondered how you can increase the click-through rate and increase you earnings. I had a site that was beginning to do pretty well in SERPs and serving up a few thousand pages a day but the click through rate was awful. I had with a similar site and a similar amount of traffic but his click-through rate was 3 or 4 times mine. His earning per click was also much higher.

The main thing I noticed about the Google Ads on my website was that the ads weren’t particularly relevant to the page on which they were shown, e.g. I might have a page about DJ/ Disc Jockey software but the ads would be for generic “free software”.

By doing some research on Google I soon found some information. I also did a bit of digging around in the PHP script I’d used for my site. I’d purchased the script but after setting up my Adsense ID, spent all my time concenrating on building links and traffic.

The first thing I found in the script was that one of the Adsense blocks used google_kw:

google_kw = “free software downloads”

At first, I thought this was the cause of my problems. Maybe this ad block was making Google serve up free software ads for all the blocks on each page.

I thought I could do a far better keyword match by coding the PHP to specify relevant keywords for each page. A little more research showed though that you had to have an Adsense Premium account, serving up 2,000,000 pages a month to use google_kw. Using google_kw without a premium account a) didn’t work; b) was against the Google TOS. So I removed google_kw and expected this would help make the ads perform better. After a day or two I noticed the click through rate was still poor and the ads were still not relevant to the pages.

The next thing I tried was using special sections to highlight to Google the content to use for matching ads. I put the following around the main, meaty content on the page:


<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->


Still no luck. A day or two later the click through was still poor and the ads were still mainly “free software” oriented. Then I had a thought - not only did I have to highlight the content, I had to tell Google to ignore the irrelevant content. Here’s a picture of a typical page on the site - the green rectangle shows the keyword-rich content, the red shows the content I needed Google to ignore.
To help the user, I’d put a line of links back to previous levels along the top of each page. I’d put these links in bold to make them clearer to read. It’s also a good SEO strategy to bold hyperlinks too and I wanted my home page to be reinforced with the keywords “Free Software Downloads”. By the looks of it Google was seeing the bold text “Free Software Downloads” on the link and aiming most ads at this text. So I put the following around the line of links:


<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->


This did the trick, the ads were immediately more relevant to each page on the whole and the next day, the click through rate was 5 times the click-through rate before.

Adsense Optimisation Adse