Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

I’m not telling you where to stick it and it’s not even my idea - AdSense folks have come up with it themselves - go have a look to get the complete story. Pay the shipping and handling and stick it all you want

Among other news, AdSense is experimenting with ads - I have noticed recently these arrows next to the AdSense ads on one of my sites that still has them:

Other people have been reporting seeing these arrows since December 2007 and I have found explanations in Google AdSense forums that this was an experiment - well considering that there’s still no official word on it anywhere in AdSense it probably still is an experiment.

I’ve been looking through my server logs and this has caught my attention. The site in question just had AdSense placed onto it but no links have been pointed at it. (The site is not new, it existed for some time, then AdSense ads have been placed onto it)

What I saw in the logs is Mediapartners-Google crawling the site some time after the ads were placed (about an hour or so) - and then right after it, 14 minutes later, Googlebot coming over. Googlebot just asked for the home page - but that’s till interesting. Another thing worth noting is they both came from the same IP - 66.249.67.104.

Looks like this is all AdCents is good for nowadays, however. As a side note, I’ve had a quick look at referral products at AdSense (I DEFINITELY have no intention promoting these - I’d rather find an affiliate program in the niche that interests me) - and the funniest part of it was Google taking its geotargeting way too far. Namely, it assumes you will be targeting only the local users with your websites and you need a few extra clicks to change it. Dohh! Hello Google, ever heard of websites being just slightly different from traditional offline brick-and-mortar shops or whatever? I get visitors to my sites from places I have never even been to - moreover, sometimes I even build sites SPECIFICALLY to target the audience in such places! How much dumber can AdSense get?

Disclaimer: I do not even know if this is old news or new news and can’t be arsed to dig into it. I just noticed it and thought I’d post about it. If you have something to say go ahead and comment but this is just my opinion and you can take it or leave it.

I don’t spend anywhere nearly as much time dealing with Google AdCents (copyright someone in Syndk8, whoever first coined the term - so very true these days) as I used to when it was still worth it - but I had to tweak some of my really old stuff and had to log into the AdSense interface. Evidently they ahve implemented a ton of changes in there but what attracted my attention the most is the littlelink saying “Allowed Sites”. Their explanation of this feature in Help goes like this:

What is my Allowed Sites list?

Allowed sites are sites or URLs on which AdSense publishers allow or wish to have their Google ads displayed. If a URL displaying your AdSense ad code is not on your Allowed Sites list, ads will still be displayed, but impressions and clicks won’t be recorded, advertisers won’t be charged, and you won’t receive any earnings for that URL.

We’ve added the Allowed Sites feature because we’ve learned that some AdSense publishers are concerned about potentially malicious behavior from others on the web, such as stealing their ad code and placing it on an inappropriate site. By offering this feature, we allow AdSense publishers more control over which sites or URLs can have their AdSense code.

Hmm, with all the banning of people’s accounts left and right, I guess they did receive a lot of criticism, and indeed I am not going to talk about the nasty techniques of killing a person’s AdSense account here - but would this feature have been in place from the very start killing somebody else’s account would have definitely been much more difficult.

On the other hand, should some newbie forget to put a site into the allowed sites list, and here’s what happens:

Will my reports show statistics from all sites with my ad code or just my Allowed Sites?

Reports will only show statistics from sites and URLs in your Allowed Sites list. Impressions, clicks, and earnings will not be recorded for sites and URLs not in your Allowed Sites list.

Oh well, I guess Google would say something has to be sacrificed anyway for the sake of security… However, it’s way too late to try fixing stuff in AdSense - I can only approximately estimate how many publishers they have lost due to 1) banning accounts, 2) cutting down the CPC, 3) cutting down the CTR with their tweaks to the ad format. Almost everybody I know who used to do AdSense either has dropped it alltogether and switched to affiliate marketing exclusively or reduced the amount of efforts they spend on Adsense to a bare minimum. Another generation of publishers needs to grow now before Google has a chance to fix their publisher network - and there is no guarantee it will ever get to the volume it used to be.

LMAO at last - took them quite some to figure out I gotta be banned!

Hello ***,

Our specialists regularly review partners participating in the AdSense
network. After a thorough review of your account, our specialists found
that your business model is not a good fit for the AdSense program.

Our specialists were concerned with your sites showing Google ads. Ads
were consistently placed on sites that had little content or which
existed primarily to display Google ads, and the placement of ads on
such pages is prohibited by AdSense policies.

More generally, we feel that the business model you’ve employed does
not comply with the spirit of Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines
- https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html, and does not
offer users a positive Google ads experience. Publishers also may not
place Google ads on pages that violate Google’s webmaster quality
guidelines
(http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality).
And as such, we’re unable to continue to partner with you.

Please rest assured that you WILL receive payment for all outstanding
earnings in accordance with the standard AdSense payment schedule.
However, you are not eligible for further participation in the AdSense
program.

Please note that we will not be able to change our decision on this
matter.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

I must say I haven’t been doing anything with that account for a good while already - I have mentioned many times before that I have now switched to affiliate business model. There were some sites still receiving some residual traffic so I was getting a check once every couple months - but nothing massive. They now owe me like $30 or so - since the payout limit is normally $100 I wonder how they will go about it? Funny how once the account is disabled you cannot even log to check how much there’s left in there - what you see when you try to log in is just

Account Not Active
An AdSense account does not exist for this login, as it is associated with an unapproved application. For more information about your application, please review the message we sent to the email address you provided with your application.

Not even a custom message for this case! LMAo considering that they started disabling accounts a couple months ago already - they could have come up with something. Say let you log in but disable the code generation or at least display a message according to the case. But no, Google isn’t bothered about being user-friendly towards spammers whose accounts it bans LMAO.

Another funny thing is not long before the ban they have upgraded my account to use Pay-Per-Action wihtout me even ever applying for it. OK, maybe they just upgrade everybody now and without looking. Needless to say I haven’t even bothered to use it, just had a quick look - I’m too busy with other things.

So, what have we - I now have a few hundred sites freed up from that account. I have a few affiliate programs in mind to use on them and will get to work a.s.a.p. Sure pay per click was good while it lasted - but with pay per action, the margin for profit is so much higher potentially. Thanks for increasing my income Google

Jennifer Slegg of Jensense has posted yesterday about one change in Google AdWords that we will soon see:

… Google will begin listing all publisher websites where AdWords advertiser’s ads are being run

Her post explains clearly what this change will mean for advertisers, and evidently from the point of view of an AdWords advertiser it’s a good change. However, what does it mean for those blackhats whose primary business model is based on MFA sites?

Evidently, this can become the end of this business model. But his change means much more. By many estimates, about 80% of the web today is spam sites, and I guess it will be safe to say that a huge part of these are MFA sites. Why? Because, depending on a spammer’s setup and automation level, it takes anywhere from 20 to 2000% less effort to build a blackhat MFA site than it takes to build a proper legitimate whitehat site. By killing off the current scheme, Google risks to lose up to 80% of its current publisher network.

Actually, just how bad are MFA sites? With many of them pursuing the long tail, the traffic they get is extremely targeted. All Google has to do is properly target the ads displayed on a site - and there we go. Google is happy, the advertiser is happy, and the blackhat owner of the MFA site is happy as well.

By killing off the current AdSense publishing model, Google will not solve the spam problem in its SERPs, as some might expect. Having tasted the easy way to make money with BH, hardly will a webmaster go back to whitehat slow process. Rather, they will switch to affiliate monetisation scheme - and it is the affiliate market that is the most aggressive, if we compare the two. It is with affiliate sites that people employ cloaking, misleading (for the visitors and Google) redirects, much larger volumes, etc. Force half the blackhats currently doing MFA sites to move into affiliate, and things will become even worse and more aggressive.

What will the MFA webmasters do once the change is implemented by Google and they start feeling its effect? Some will leave the scene - either for good or for affiliate model, like I said. Others will find ways to beautify their MFA sites enough to trick the advertisers into leaving them in theri list of sites where their ads are displayed - thus maybe even making them grayhat rather than the darkest shade of black. As for those combining both models currently, placing AdSense ads alongside with affiliate ads - I would stop doing it, depending on the quality of the site. Google’s listing of AdSense publishing sites may lead to increased (undesired) exposure of your affiliate sites - which can harm the affiliate side of things.

Once upon a time, every spammer publisher was using AdSense for their sites monetization and it was making them enough cash to keep them happy. The times have changed since and the evil Google has introduced separate bid setup for AdWords advertisers across the content network (i.e. our MFA sites) so that no matter how much a keyword costs across the search network, it’s a whole different story for the content network and nobody would pay the same amount for ads placed on your and my sites any more.

This gloomy setup has become the basis for the two ebooks by Scott Boulch, Death of AdSense and Life after AdSense. In the second one of these books, he writes about an alternative way of making money online using AdWords content network for advertising your affiliate sites for 5 cents a click.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying AdSense is what it used to be (anybody who says that must be blind), nor am I saying that it’s not worth it trying to make more money using affiliate stuff. What I’m trying to do is simply get the facts straight. Sure, exaggeration is good for narrative purposes, but it might not be that good for building a business.

So what have we, let’s look at Google’s AdWords Help Center, namely the part of it that explains what site targeting is. in my opinion, this is a must read for every AdSense publisher. What we want to know first of all is:

How do keyword-targeted and site-targeted campaigns differ?

Here’s what Google tells us:

Keyword-Targeted Campaign

Site-Targeted Campaign

How are ads priced?

Cost-per-click (CPC). You set the price you’d like to pay each time a user clicks on your ad. You are charged only when a user clicks.

Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM). You set the price you’d like to pay for each 1000 impressions the ad receives. Clicks don’t matter — you are charged whenever the ad is shown to a user

So there is no such thing as cost per click for content network ads even. Now then, another vital question, what is the minimum bid you can set for  each 1,000 impressions?

Quoting Google AdWords Help Center again:

The minimum cost-per-thousand (CPM) bid for a site-targeted ad is US$0.25 or the local currency equivalent.

But wait, even this is not the  complete picture yet:

As with all AdWords advertising, you’ll compete for space with other advertisers. If you choose very prominent and popular sites, you’ll need a higher price to win the ad position.

So you can pay 25 cents per thousand impressions and have your ad shown on sites that hardly get any traffic (meaning  it’s of no use to you) or you will end  up paying  no less than across  the search network for the sites that  are worth apearing on.  As we see, there’s more in it than meets the eye.

This whole new setup is fascinating and holds a load of opportunities. I am very eager to test it more and play with it - but what this should teach one is always check your information and always get the facts right before doing anything.

So I’ve been hanging out at LinkedIn, among other fancy social places, and their revenue model, if you haven’t checked yet, is based on placing AdSense on their pages, among other stuff. Every webmaster who ever dealt with AdSense knows that getting AdSense to display targeted ads related to the contents of the page is not rocket science - you just have to get a few things right and there ya go. However, sometimes it is not the best way of monetizing your traffic.

It struck me that the ads displayed, say, on my contacts page, albeit perfectly targeted to fit the contents of that page, are not targeted at all to get ME to click them. Me being an SEO, most of my contacts on LinkedIn are SEOs - no surprise here. The word “SEO” alone is mentioned like 4 times on that page, in my contacts’ headlines. And besides that, there’s also “Search Engine Optimization”, “Online Marketing”, “Search and Marketing”, “Online Advertising” and the like. You get the picture. Only keyword stuffed pages of evil spammers get more targeted than that. So, Google Mediabot, being the smart little lad he is, serves up ads for “SEO firm”, “Web Promotion”, etc. that’s all fine from the algorithmic point of view, but keep in mind I am an SEO myself! - What’s the chance of me clicking on those ads? - Right, very close to 0, unless I am researching my potential competition or something.

This sort of keyword targeted page with an AdSense ad would work perfectly well if that page was publicly accessible and thus available through search engines. The way LinkedIn is set up, I am the only person who can view that page. Well, and my SEO contacts too - which doesn’t make it any better. What would be a better scenario for LinkedIn to monetize their traffic? - have some ads that would target the interests of the people viewing the page. Serve those ads based on the data you have about those people. Just a quick simple example: if a person says in their profile he’s an SEO - serve him ads for SEO-related tools, seminars, books, whatever. That would be so much more likely to convert. Google AdSense does not allow that kind of targeting nowadays - so why not use something that’s at your disposal anyway (user data) and monetize it properly? Sure, just sticking AdSense code on a page is much easier - but with some thought and analysis, the results could be so much better than that.

Well, Google is slowly pushing its users to unified accounts for all the services it offers. As Problogger reports, AdSense users are now asked to switch to using Google accounts - not like I would have noticed if not for this post as I use a gmail login anyway.

The general public’s most notable reaction is getting annoyed over having to re-login every time if you use several different accounts for different stuff. Well, it’s been a reality for me for a good while already as I had to use multiple accounts even for Gmail itself (isn’t it hard to believe there are still people who only use one ). However, one solution I’ve come up with is logging into different accounts using different browsers (as in , Firefox for one account and IE for another one, and so on if you need to be logged into more at the same time). This solution of course has its limitations too, you can’t run an unlimited number of browsers on your computer as they will all add up to the CPU load…

Once again Google has updated its TOS. Now users who haven’t yet logged into their account since it happened are presented with the new TOS first off and only after they read and accept it they are allowed to proceed further. Among the most notable things that have changed there is the addition of Referral buttons.

Referrals seems like a very good idea - quoting Google:

When a publisher that signed up for AdSense through your referral earns their initial $100.00 and is eligible for payout, we’ll credit your account with $100.00

Other innovations include an option to view the top queries if you’re using AdSense for search - what people searched for and how many times. Now, that’s really handy!

It is now possible to receive AdSense payments directly instead of checks. Quoting AdSense support:

What’s New - September 2005
Electronic Funds Transfer is out of beta

Electronic Funds Transfer is ready for the big-time! We’ve been working hard on our payment system, and with our thanks to the thousands of AdSense publishers who took part in our beta test, we’re now ready to bring EFT out of beta.

Publishers who have already received payments through EFT don’t need to do anything – they can continue to have their payments conveniently deposited directly into their bank accounts.

If you would like to sign up for the first time, you’ll need to enter your bank account information through your AdSense account. We’ll then make a small test deposit into that bank account – once you’ve verified the amount of this test deposit, you’ll be all set up for direct deposit. Please note that, if you signed up during the beta period but didn’t receive a payment, you’ll need to register your bank account again now and complete the verification process.

Remember, there’s no charge to receive your payments through EFT, and your AdSense payments are converted into your local currency before being deposited directly into your bank account. EFT is available to publishers with payment addresses in 16 different countries.