Cracking the AdSense Puzzle

If you're into SEO, web optimization or making an income from the web then you will either have employed or are thinking about adding AdSense to your website. But what about all those people out there making $1000s from AdSense every day? How do they do it?

I'll admit that I use AdSense extensively on my site, though it's really more a sideline than a main income source, though it the money from AdSense campaigns does bring in more than enought to pay for my domain names, hosting plans and my DSL access. But I only have a handful of sites and they're all content-focussed. Indeed, I'm operating completely the wrong kind of model to make and real money from AdSense.

In reality, if you want to make serious money from AdSense then you'll need something like 1000 sites with just enough content to get them indexed and the maximum number of AdSense ads on each page with those ads blended into the text as far as possible. You will need to target these pages with the best keywords you can find and you then need to buy a whole bunch of under-performing keywords in AdWords to drive some traffic to the sites (about 10 per page as a minimum) and you need to keep writing pages with new ISPs as the ones you have already are likely to be banned from Google quite quickly. As a result, to make $10 000 per month (which is possible) you will need to spend at least $6000 per month.

You're also entirely dependent on a single stream of money and as Google is tightening its rules for the kinds of sites (as described in my previous post on Google's slap in the face for small sites). The limiting of the number of AdSense ads you can have on a page to 3 is also limiting this business model somewhat. The problem is that most of these sites are either entirely spam or contain useless information and are polluting the search indexes. Google is right to try and eliminate them.

Another AdSense model is to set-up so-called AdSense microsites that are sites targeted to a specific niche or keywords set. These types of sites do have real content, although they are tiny in size. But there's still the problem that you're entirely dependent on Google's AdSense program for all your income. If Google chages its rules or indexing algorithm again your entire income may vanish in a puff of smoke.

The secret to maintaining your on-line income (and it's not really a secret) is multiple streams of income. Increase the number of revenue streams that you have. This way if one source of income dries-up (as it's likely to in the current search engine environment) you still have other sources of income to rely on. Diversify and, as I point out in a previous post on the importance of products provide something that visitors to your site will want.

How do you know which sites to link to?

From the very beginning Google's 'page rank' has been derived from the number of links coming into a given site. With Google's recent updates to it's algorithms this has become a matter of greater urgency for webmasters as the only way to be regularly crawled and indexed by Google is to have sufficient incoming links to your site. But these should not just be directed to your home page. You should also have links coming in to deeper sections and pages of your site — as many of these as you can in fact.

It's all well and good to say this but which sites should you seek to gain link exchanges from. Obviously you should avoid automated link exchange systems as these could get you penalized as belonging to a 'bad neighbourhood'. Apart from these the knee-jerk reaction is to say: go for websites with high PR (page rank) ie sites with PR of 4 or more. There are many sites out there that will tell you the page rank of a site or page. There are some link exchange sites that won't even accept links unless the page you're putting your link on has a PR of 4 or better.

The problem here is that the PR as calculated by Google is notoriously unreliable. It's only updated every three months and generally tends to underestimate the true PR of a site/page. Indeed, a quick check of some of my pages showed that Google was indicating about 10 incoming links and a PR of 3. In fact I have over 80 incoming links and the PR should have been at least 4!

If you can't trust PR then how do you make a decision about which pages and sites to try to link to and which to avoid? Below are some guidelines that you may want to think about when considering link partners:

1. The target website represents someone you'd want to be associated with. It may sound obvious, but think about the site you're attempting to link to. If they don't represent someone that you'd like to be associated with then don't go for a link exchange with them.

2. Make sure your target link is relevant. Again this is an issue that I've addressed before. Google is now checking incoming links to your site and if they're not deemed 'relevant' then you may be penalized.

3. Ensure that the website performs well on Google. As PR is not a reliable measure of a website's 'worth' you still need some measure of whether it's a good thing to link to a particular web page/site. One of the best ways to do this is to come up with a few relevent search terms then check how your target website performs in these searches. If the page consistently performs well in these searches then it's definitely worth linking to.

4. Your links on the target site should be accessible to search engines. In recent months a number of link sites have been using rather underhanded practices to hoard page rank. They've been garnering links to a page in their site but using the 'nofollow' tag they prevent the outgoing links from being spidered. Such links will not help your pages' rankings at all.

5. Try to get your links embeded in the body of the target website's copy This is a tip to maximize any traffic you're getting from your links. The truth is that if your link is part of the text then it will be clicked more often than it if was on a side-bar or at the very bottom of the page.

6. Ensure the target website allows you to use your own text The text that accompanies your website's description is a critical part of your marketing and branding. As a result you should only really link to websites that allow your to define your own description of your website.

7. The page on which the link sits shouldn't be too far away from the home page The general rule of thumb here is that search engines in general won't index very much that's more than three layers deeper than the home page. Essentially the first link to your website shouldn't be more than three clicks away from the site's home page (this is how the BBC organizes their site). If, say your link is three clicks away from the home page but a further click takes you to a detail page about your site then this is OK.

8. The target link links to specific content Many linking systems only want to link to your home page. However, you want the search engines to index as much of your site as possible. As a result you will want to have a number of link exchanges that are deep links into your website. This is most easily achieved by writing articles in which you embed your URL. However, if your website is divided into fairly obvious sectons (and your top-level directories link to your content) then you may be able to exchange such URLs with more focussed websites. A good example of this would be the brewing section of my website http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/brewing/ which I've had considerable success exchanging links for.

Of course, almost no link exchanges will meet with all these criteria; just use your judgement about the ones that are most important for your needs. I wish you luck in you link exchanges.

Google's Slap in the Face for Small Marketers

Unless you've been hibernating in a corner somewhere, then you can't have failed to hear the furore that recent changes to some of Google's rules have created. The advertising community are beginning to call this the 'Google Slap' as it appears that Google have effectively delivered a 'slap in the face' to a large number of their advertising customers.

Just in case you've been hibernating (or, more likely you've been on vacation somewhere) here's a recap on Google's new rules:

What they've done is to come up with Quality Score that Google defines as: 'A value placed on an individual domain that reflects the quality of the content contained within it.'. Which is nice and vague. But it boils down to the fact that if Google decides that your site doesn't contain sufficient 'useful' content then your site will be penalized within the search engine.

Take, as an example, a very common scenario: an internet marketer is running an AdWords campaign that targets a single page which contains little more than a tiny amount of text and an opt-in form then this site will undoubtedly be penalized under Google's new rules. Indeed all sites that are little more than just one page sales letters, squeeze pages, pure AdSense sites or affiliate sites will be hit by this rule. Which basically covers everything that traditional affiliate and product marketers use to sell their wares.

At the moment it looks as if this penalty will both reduce the ranking of your site whilst increasing the per-clik cost of and AdSense advertisement targeting your pages.

Even worse is that these penalties, as described in Google's statement are levied at the domain level. This could potentially mean that you could have some wonderful pages with literally loads of useful contnet on them, but if Google has decided that the remainder of your website is complete crapola then your entire domain will be affected!

It also seems that Google is also checking varous other things such as:
— the age of your domain (how long your site has been on-line)
— the number of pages from your site that Google has indexed
— whether or not your have a page on your site stating your privacy policy
— whether you have a 'contact' or 'about me' page on your site.

Undoubtedly Google is doing this to try and combat 'spam sites' ie sites that spring up overnight and contain nothing but auto-generated pages full of links, and/or appear to be built simply to display Google Adsense advertisements without really providing quality content. However, as seems the norm for 'King Google' at the moment (see my Has Google lost the plot 1 and Has Google lost the plot 2 articles for more) they've created an essentially arbitary set of rules that will nds up penalizing new businesses who have brand new domain names and who simply haven't had enough time to fill their site up with content as well as the 'spammers' (but this, again, seems to be part of Google's current strategy).

Given that this represents the new reality, what do you need to do to overcome this latest google hurdle?

There are a few work arounds for the 'Google Slap' (though as with any workaround your mileage may vary and they're not guranteed to offer complete protection. Especially as we effectvely have a rapidly-moving target here. However, there are things that you can do to improve your overall quality score.

Once you've looked through the list it will come as no surprise that many of the points detailed here are fairly standard SEO procedures and are detailed more thoroughly in my eBook The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic.

1. Install a Blog on your Domain

A blog is an excellent way of providing content for your domain. If you don't have one then set it up now and start posting to it. It's also important that your blog is hosted on your domain and that you link to it from your main sitemap.

If your site is new then you should know that adding a blog to it will darmatically increase your site's standing (and the number of pages indexed from it) in Google's eyes.

If you have affiliate landing pages that are basically isolated from the remainder of your domain (to keep visitors there) than at least link your blog to these pages and these pages to your blog as this will improve the amount of content visible from them.

1. Get More Incoming Links

There's no getting away from this one: the more In-Bound Links (IBLs) you have then the higher the ranking of your site and the better your ranking in Google's eyes.

But be careful. Don't get involved with link 'farms' but do submit your links to link sites. You can also write articles and press releases (but make sure to add your site's links to them).

Also find sites with similar content/user profiles to yours and ask them if they're willing to exchange links with you (most will be happy to).

3. Make sure you add a 'Privacy Policy' & 'Contact Us'

This one is a direct response to Google's new rules: The 'contact us' page is easy enough. Just create a page with your name, e-mail contact and if appropriate your telephone number, business name and contact address.

Now create a 'Privacy Policy' page. This is a little trickier to produce. You could simply do a search for 'privacy policy', look at the kinds of variations avaialble and then code a variant up for your own use.

Alternativey you could add a 'P3P' which is a new web standard that allows websites to declare privacy policies regarding things like the use of cookies and the storage of e-mail addresses. For a more detailed exposition of this have a look at wikipedia's entry on P3P.

4. Build a Site Map

This is pretty-much a no-brainer. Search engines love site maps and if you use an automated sitemap generator (such as google's sitemaps genrator you even get a breakdown of any problems in your site. Just make sure that your sitemap also lists your contact and privacy policy pages.

5. Add Links to any Affiliate Landing Pages

This is the biggest departure from marketing norms. Previously you would not have considered adding a link to anywhere from your affiliate landing pages. But, in this brave new world of Google rules you must at the very least make certain that your landing pages link to your privacy policy and contact pages. It is also probably a good idea to link your landing pages to your blog (and vice versa) as this will provide real contnet to associate with your pages.

6. Add More Content!

Again this is a no-brainer. Google's touchstones for a site's worth are definitely becoming the overall content of a site and the number of in-bound links it has. As a result you should add as much content as you can to a domain.

You could do this with eZine-type articles but if you do so at least make certain that you add your own commentary around the article otherwise you may receive the dreated 'duplicate content' penalty. Even a three or four-hundred word review on an affiliate product can be enough to provide you with 'real' content.


Truthfully, however, the writing has been on the wall for some time as regards 'thin' affiliate-focussed websites with little or no true content and it's one of the reasons that I decided to build my own website on the large-scale model, adding content first and then focussing on marketing and income strategies. It undoubtedly lead to a lowering of my opt-in conversions (as visitors could move elewhere in my site) but it may just turn-out to be a good long-term strategy.

Still Riding the Google Merrygoround

An update to my various previous posts on this issue. After taking a bit of a well-earned rest around my birthday I came back to see that Google was claiming 5000 pages in my site indexed (after a bit of digging it turned out to be more like 1300 pages but that was still wonderful!). OK, so a lot of pages were pretty rubbish and not very useful, still there were lots of 'good' pages in that list and I was really excited.

By Saturday the total was down to 181 and by today it was 148 pages indexed. So, what the hell happened to increase my number of indexed pages ten-fold and then to decrease again to just about what it's always been. I know that I've put a fair amount of effort into getting in-bound links (but Google isn't showing any of these). I can find them via MSN and Yahoo! searches.

So, what the hell is going on? Is Google broken beyond the hope of recovery (as seems likely for all fairly new websites). And will deep pages full of content such as my guide to edible wild foods which is three levels down within the site ever be indexed?

I'm at the point of complete and utter frustration with the whole web indexing system, especially as I add new good content that's being totally ignored by the indexing engines. What is the point?

The Re-direction Problem

With the search engines clamping-down on 302-type redirects (temporary redirects) as these are used in the unsavoury practice of web page hijacking (where a php or other script is used to driect search 'bots to the originating page but all other requests are directed to another page). As a result the originating page is indexed but almost all seearches are directed somewhere else.

The search engines have taken action against these underhanded tactics by effectively banning all 302 redirection requests. This has led many webmasters to fall foul of the new wat that the search engines look at the world and have either suffered dramatic drops in the number of pages indexed or have been banned entirely from Google. Salutory lesson number 1 is this: if you have more than one domain name pointing at your website then plaese, plase make certain that they are all re-directed to your main site using 301 (permanent) redirects.

So why, you might ask, am I prattling-on about 301 and 302 redirects... Well, I'm trying to gather as many domain names with 'celtnet' in them as possible and I've just bought 'www.celtnet.net' via my ISP. I was trying to sort-out a redirect from this to my main site www.celtnet.org.uk. Of course, after securing the domain I need to link it to my old domain so that the 'www.celtnet.net' domain name points at my existing pages. However, on searching my ISPs information pages they seem only to offer either 302 redirects or the inclusion of the old domain's pages within a window in the new domain.

The second solution really doesn't help me and the first solution could get me banned from Google! Not very helpful at all! I've just contacted my ISP to see what this is all about but for the moment I have a new domain name that I can't connect to my existing website because it's the wrong type of redirect.

The moral of this story, if you're buying alternate domain names from your ISP or your hosting provider make sure that they offer you the correct kind of redirect otherwise you may end-up with a domain name that you can't connect to anything.

A Red-letter Day for the Recipe Site

As well as the more standard means of making income on my webiste (Amazon marketing, eBay Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, eBook selling) I also maintain more information-focussed areas on my website. Some of these are purely altruistic in nature (such as the Celtic regions of the celtnet.org.uk part of the site. Other regions, such as the poetry corner include Google ads, but are really there as a showcase for both ancient and modern poetry.

Then I havea growing recipe secion to the site which is intended to inform (in that it has recipes from the ancient (ie stone, bronze and iron ages), roman, medieval and Elizabethan periods, as well as specifically Welsh recipes. Allied to these are various ancient recipes for beers and meads without which no ancient meal is complete.

Over the years I've collected many thousands of recipes and I'm slowly adding these to the website in a miscellaneous modern recipe section. With the addition of this recipe repository I've now just passed the four hundred recipe mark, with an expected fifty additional recipes to be added to the site tomorrow. Partly this is a desire to get the information and all the recipes I've gathered 'out there'. But the recipes are also a good source of AdSense income.

To this end I've attempted to add value to the recipe site by adding a recipe search facility that allows every recipe in the collection to be searched by name, food section period as well as by free text search. A cut-down version of this recipe search is also provided on each page in the recipe secton. Though the recipes are all provided with metric measurements I do also provide conversion pages for volumes, mass/weight and tempreature that allow conversions between a range of units, both modern and ancient. Partly this is alturism in helping the website's visitors, though the pages also draw-in AdSense customers.

As with everything, the more content one has the better, and the more likely it is that someone will visit a page and click on a relevant link. I've also begun to add relevant Amazon links to my recipe-associated pages, such as the page on the history of the spice trade and the guide to spices which is slowly being linked out to varous recipes incorporating the spices described in the main text. This is increasing linkage within my site and within regions of the recipe secton (if you want to learn why this is important, have a look at my Maximize your Web Traffic eBook.

Oddly enough, the recipe site itself grew out of my main Celtic site and included recipes important to the various histories of Celtic Britain. Though once produced the section soon assumed a life of its own. It's even been an excellent marketing ploy and sectons of the site are being syndicated by other sites. As cookery is a growth area I'll soon be adding reviews of cookware and links to supplies or cookware and cooking products. As far as I'm concerned this is an area of the website that can only grow in value.

The Importance of email Systems

In my previous blogs on generating my first product and the importance of having a product I've gone through the journey of creating an internet-based product before creating and then making that product available.

Today the journey approaches its conclusion as I discuss marketing the product, in particular eMail marketing with autoresponders. After looking at the market and what was available I finally decided to go with followingup.com who seem to have a fair monthly price, allow you to define up to a hundred outgoing messages for every campaign you have. As a result they can more than cater for my current needs and have significant room for future expansion.

But why the sudden rush to get an autoresponder up and running you may ask... Well, one of the best ways to get someone interested in a product is to entice them with a give-away. I've already done this with the eBook The Secrets to Maximizing your Web Traffic itself by bundling other products along with it. For an information product, however, the easiest thing to tive away is information. So I've created a five-day course to send out to anyone who signs-up for it that supplies tasters of the eBook, some real, useful, information and plenty of reminders that my eBook still exists. This way I grow my eMail list and provide interested visitors with plenty of chances to sign up for my product. A win-win situation.

Just think of what an autoresponder could do for your business and keep plugging away at your marketing efforts.

My first Product!

As I mentioned in my previous post (below) I've come to the conclusion that the only way to really make money on the internet is to have a product. As a result I've been converting various pages on my website and adding some things that I've found out on the way into an eBook. This took quite a few days to complete, with graphics, pagination issues, indexing and creating cover art, but by last Tuesday I had my eBook: 'The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic' was written.

Of course, that wasn't the end of things. I needed a sales page (which can be found here). Then I needed a way of actually physically selling the eBook. I created a protected directory for the downloads, an isolated web page to facilitate downloads. That way almost all my infrastructure was complete. But I still needed a way of actually physically selling my product.

ClickBank was a no-brainer just because of the sheer number of people using it. But it is expensive and fairly inflexible in terms of the features offered. In searching for an alternative means of handling affiliates as well as payments I came across paydotcom.com which seemed to offer an excellent service. As a result I set-up paydotcom as my main processing and affiliate-handling service. Which literallly took three minutes. After adding the payment links to my web pages and my affiliate handling links I was done.

Half an hour ago I ftp'd all my pages to the website and I was up and running. In a bout of creativity I'd even created a whole load of affiliate marketing material, including banners, eZine advertising copy, classified advertising copy and an e-mail newsletter. Things were looking good!

Admittedly, if you're thinking of creating your own eBooks (after this first one I have a further five in the pipeline) there are several big hurdles. You need to convert your text to PDF, you need to create graphics and you need to put the whole thing together. Personally I'm very hands-on about this (it probably comes from having an artistic bent and having worked in the publishing trade for a while). But if you're not into doing it all yourself you could do worse than having a look at the services offered by someone like evieb

The Importance of Product

As I mentioned in my previous post Is Product the Key to Success? I think that pretty much the only way of making serious money on the Internet is to create a real product and to market it. As a result I've been working on tow eBook products: 'The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic' and 'The Guide to Building and Upgrading your PC'.

In addition I've been working on a sales system for these products, including support and eMail. Here's where having a good autoresponder system comes into its own, allowing you to set-up an automated stream of eMails to both prospective and current customers.

Then there's the purchasing system itself (or themselves). For the current projects I've gone for both Paydotcom wihch has an excellent pricing range and good affiliate tools as well as ClickBank as one of the largest on-line merchants of electronic products.

Using both of these systems covers much of the electronic sales market. With the products and the sales systems covered and the sales letters actually written all I have left to do are some of the ancillary products: writing the eMail sales letters and follow-ups, along with information and content to aid with affiliate sales. I aim to write and/or construct these over the next few days and with any luck the sales site itself will go live early next week.

Stay tuned to this blog to find out how things go.