Search Optimization School

You know, I planned on writing a lot of articles for this site to help webmasters get better and higher web page rankings in the search engines. However, the whole reason a webmaster wants better rankings is to get more traffic. And 98% of web site owners want to monetize that traffic and turn it into money. One of the most common ways to turn that traffic into money is by using google adsense. Back in the early days of the web, putting ads on your site – like banner ads or popups, was seen as “selling out”. Nowadays – everybody wants to sell out, and find and exploit the easiest ways to make money online. Unfortunately this has led to many web sites being setup with mostly ads and little content. These are MFA or “Made for Adsense” sites, or a web site with little or no other purpose than to make money from adsense. Sometimes you will see what I call DCA sites, or “Daisy Chain Adsense” sites. This is where you search for something in google, and click on a result and go to an MFA site with mostly ads. Clicking on one of those ads leads you to another MFA, and another, and another, etc. The site owner loves this because you have click on multiple ads multiple times paying him each time through adsense revenue. The user hates this, because it’s just more and more wasted time online trying to find what you’re looking for.

Web site owners have complained for a very long time that google has done nothing about this, and in fact encouraged by allowing it to occur. Many have speculated that google doesn’t mind since every click (of an adsense ad) just makes them more money – so they turn a blind eye. Well, no more – because google has finally decided to put an end to shady web site owners profiting off of their back. In the last few weeks hundreds, if not thousands, of “low value content” web sites have had their accounts cancelled because “they were not a good fit for the adsense program”. This is great news for search engine users, google is actually trying to improve it’s results.

Google has also cancelled many adsense (and adwords) accounts for using “arbitrage” for profit. Arbitrage is the practice of buying keywords through a google adwords account to target and send traffic to your web site, and then having adsense ads on your web pages for people to click on once they get there. Basically, these site owners are betting that by doing a little research – they can buy really cheap keywords through adwords, and then make more money (than they spent) by users clicking on adsense ads once they get there. Essentially “arbitrage” or “buying your own traffic” just seems ethically wrong, and google must think so as well since they’ve been actively shutting down both adsense and adwords accounts of people suspected of doing this.

It’s good that google is valuing quality search results over profit, and this would go hand in hand with their “don’t be evil” policy. Even though google is the dominant search engine, with as much of a stranglehold on search as Microsoft has on the desktop, I think they are looking ahead to the future. They want to retain that position, and they know that keeping the search results as pure as possible keeps them competitive.

Google has also been cracking down on other web sites lately that are in violation with their TOS (Terms of Service). I was personally caught up in this myself, as one of my sites received a warning email from google stating that I violated the adsense TOS because my website contained “adult or mature” content. At first I was pretty pissed of – because this site as in excess of 30,000 pages. And a lot of the content is derived from current headlines and popular news stories. I have a block in one of the margins on this site that lists the top 20 (accessed) stories for that day. I forget sometimes the real nature of people. Take a look sometimes at the top searched keywords for different search engines. Inevitably, the top 20 always have something to do with sex or adult themes. Time after time, these are the most popular things that people search for. Out of the 30,000 pages my web site has less than 300 with stories about or related to sex and adult themes. That’s about 1% of my content. However, out of the “top 20 accessed” block on my site – probably 15 are adult themed or sex related. By sheer human nature, they just always seem to end up the most popular. Google has determined that because of this that they don’t want (adsense) to be associated with this web site.

Ironically, many of the ads that appeared through adsense were adult related – from people buying adult keywords through google adwords. So one argument is that they should control the purchase of certain keywords in adwords in addition to closing adsense accounts on adult related sites. Also – google has begun attacking “duplicate content”. Duplicate content is just what you think it is – the same content on 2 different web sites, or 2 different pages on the same web site. With so many blogs and aggregators, news headlines sites, etc., it is very important that the originator of a story get much higher preference in search results vs. the “duplicate content” sites.

Google isn’t killing the adsense accounts for sites with duplicate content – but they are giving preference to the originating sites, and sending the duplicate content URL’s to a “supplemental index”. So, it’s more important now than ever write original content in your web sites. Google has recently applied for 2 patents that accomplish this. The first is for LSI or “Latent Semantic Indexing”. The second is for “Phrase Matching”. These patents, along with a 600,000 keyword index will drastically change which web site pages are indexed and where they come up in the search results. You can tell that in may ways, this goes hand in hand with google’s removing of “low value content” web sites. Sites with “duplicate content” are pretty much low value too aren’t they? And by removing all but the original to a “supplemental index”, aren’t you making your search results even more pure?

So be aware of these new google rules, and how they might affect both your web site, and your adsense and adwords accounts. Content is king!? You can read about google’s new actions in many webmaster forums, like these postings over at Webmaster World.