Where's the 'sense' in Adsense ?

[Ross Dawson]

Here’s a gripe. It’s only a bit of a gripe – not a full blown kick the cat gripe – and it’s not aimed at decent content providers who make money from Adsense.

We sell pearls. One of our keywords in Google’s Adwords programme is ‘pearl necklaces’. Our site provides pages of information about pearls which visitors say are helpful and informative.

Sadly, these pages were designed for the visitor, not to optimise the keywords. Type them into Google and we are nowhere in the organic results – zilch, not a mention. So be it. We need to work harder at optimisation.

There’s another site. They don’t sell pearl necklaces. They do however appear in the top three in Google’s organic results for these keywords. Visit the link and you find half a page of highly optimised semi-literate information plus a load of Adsense adverts, including ours.

They do the same for mobile phones, health products, children’s games, computers, telecomms equipment – you name it, they’ve got a page of optimised rubbish for it with, of course, Adsense adverts and a high ranking in Google search results.

Is this wrong ? Or am I being naïve ? It just seems to me that a company that prides itself on delivering relevant content shouldn’t allow this sort of manipulation.

[seobook]

Originally Posted by Ross Dawson

Is this wrong ? Or am I being naïve ? It just seems to me that a company that prides itself on delivering relevant content shouldn’t allow this sort of manipulation.

search engines are still not that amazingly powerful. SEO would not exist as it does today if search engine results were extremely difficult to manipulate.

if you do not spend money to optimize your sites and others do then they will likely outrank you.

if you do not like sponsoring the junk sites running your adsense ads then turn off AdWords content syndication.

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by Ross Dawson

Sadly, these pages were designed for the visitor, not to optimise the keywords. Type them into Google and we are nowhere in the organic results – zilch, not a mention. So be it. We need to work harder at optimisation.

There’s another site. They don’t sell pearl necklaces. They do however appear in the top three in Google’s organic results for these keywords. Visit the link and you find half a page of highly optimised semi-literate information plus a load of Adsense adverts, including ours.

... a company that prides itself on delivering relevant content shouldn’t allow this sort of manipulation.

What Seobook said and more. Ranking is but the result of marketing. What you are saying is that you don't like their site, but they do a better job of marketing. So change that.

This can however, be viewed as serving YOUR purposes. If the ROI on the cost per click is there, then what does it matter? They come up tops and your ad is there so as long as they are not clicking on their own links, you in essence get the benefit of them being on top. Also consider that they are taking up a position that could be occupied by one of your competitors. Since they don't sell, they do not compete.

If you haven't guessed, there are thousands of sites out there that exist for no other purpose than advertising and AdSense fuels those endeavors. Google could be more selective. But what many who do not use AdSense do not know is that Google says you only need to be authorized once on one site. After that, you can put your code on as many sites as you want. In some instances, Google will authorize on a good quality site and then the owner will migrate that code over to a plethora of sites that exist only for Google advertising.

[Buzliteyear]

Ditto.

I feel this same frustration. My site is chock full of content. When I do searches on certain important terms, I get these total spam sites.

What is even crazier is I live each day in fear of being booted from AdSense for an unknown reason. Meanwhile, I following the TOS to the letter but see the spam sites everywhere.

Just venting.

[seobook]

Originally Posted by Buzliteyear

Ditto.

I feel this same frustration. My site is chock full of content. When I do searches on certain important terms, I get these total spam sites.

What is even crazier is I live each day in fear of being booted from AdSense for an unknown reason. Meanwhile, I following the TOS to the letter but see the spam sites everywhere.

Just venting.

the search engine TOS are based upon the search engines having a functional business model and a quality product. certainly most sites will need to fall in line with many of them, but if low quality sites from competitors are able to rank well look for what they are doing right and do it better and then look for what they are doing wrong and do a better job of doing it well.

[ephricon]

Originally Posted by Papadoc

What Seobook said and more. Ranking is but the result of marketing. What you are saying is that you don't like their site, but they do a better job of marketing. So change that.

I largely agree. However, sucess - IMO - is dependent upon two things. 1) Effective Marketing and 2) Quality Product.

I believe there is a saying... "The fastest way to kill a bad product is good advertising."

Well, for good rankings you need to do a great job of marketing externally (press releases, mentions and links on related sites, yadayada) and in turn you also need a great product - in this case your site itself.

If you site has great content, you're more likely to have other sites link to it w/o any request from you (the whole driving idea behind links as a factor in the first place). You're also more likely to get bookmarked and have repeat visitors. In the long run, great (preferably original as well) content is crucial to success. That said, there are plenty a great content site with zippy links and zippy rankings. Those sites w/ poor content that you are venting about will *eventually* be discounted with a proper algorithm adjustment. In theory, in time the best rankings will look for both great content and great credibility (links, outside factors).

[Jenstar]

What is even crazier is I live each day in fear of being booted from AdSense for an unknown reason.

You really only need to worry if you are doing something that goes against the terms or policies. Every publisher that I know of that has been suspended, has been suspended for good reason (framing someone else's content, encouraging clicks, clicking themselves, using stolen content). Google wants to continue earning money from you, and they won't suspend you without a darn good reason.

[Ross Dawson]

Some interesting comments so, as I started it, here’s my twopenny worth…

First, I agree with the people who say that if you invest in better marketing, either by yourself, or by employing the services of a professional, you should be rewarded in terms of rankings. No argument there.

However, that was not really my point.

The site I was refering to has, for a given keyword, about half a page of body copy surrounded by adverts. No images, no graphics, no navigation (apart from one link to the home page) and meaningless content. The copy itself, though awful, has proper header tags and keyword content.

I’m a very long way from being a pro’ but I think even I could design a page like that.

Now, imagine the scenario where many such sites spring up for all sorts of search terms and dominate or monopolise the first page in Google.

Who is this good for ?

It’s bad for searchers because they will CTR (click to rubbish). I just invented that – must be too much wine !

It’s bad for people like us (hopefully delivering decent content) because we are shunted off into the never-never land of distant pages.

It’s bad for Google because searchers will get cheesed off with their results.

It’s bad for search marketing professionals trying to optimise sites which are content rich and user friendly.

In the short term at least, there’s only one winner. “It’s search Jim, but not as we know it”. Sorry.

I’ll add my usual caveat that, as a newcomer to all this, I may well be posting nonsense. Please don’t bash me too hard, though a little bashing is quite stimulating.

[ephricon]

Originally Posted by Ross Dawson

I’m a very long way from being a pro’ but I think even I could design a page like that.

Unfortunately good quality, aesthetically-pleasing design has absolutely nothing to do with high search engine rankings. In fact, many times some components of aesthetically-pleasing sites can have quite the opposite effect...

Search engines use spiders to find information, and algoritms to rank resulting sites. They don't see the site the same way you and I do, they only see code and tags.

I suspect there's one of two things going on with the you have mentioned:

1) Its very well-optimized (on page - code, keyword frequency, etc.) and has great incoming links with good anchor text from great sites.

or

2) Its cloaking or using other "unethical" and/or tricks to present one thing to the user and another thing to the search engine. These tactics are questionable at best, but can certainly be effective, if only for a while until the search engines learn to identify them and penalize or discount them.

This help to clarify things?

[Dave Hawley]

Hi Ross

It can be dishearting I know. However, all the noise in the world won't change it. If you want good ranking take heed of one simple concept.

Content is king! Do not fall into the trap (as most do) of relying on one page(usually the home page), or even a few pages for all/most traffic. Lot's of good quality content pages will be you single best insurance against SE flutuations and keeping a constant steadily increasing number of hits. Optimize each for only a few specific keywords/phrases.

Aim for 1000 hits from 100 page and not 1000 hits from <10 pages.