AdMoolah News and Views

I often see advice in forums telling people not to use AdWords to drive traffic to a site that uses AdSense. For example, today, this threadd at DigitalPoint forums, which asks “Will I get banned if use adwords on my site with adsense?”. One person advises:

using adwords to get traffic to an adsense optimized site IS called Arbitrage which google doesn’t like. i would not suggest it

I also found this advice in another thread at DigitalPoint:

Hey, thats againt TOS. You cannot send Adwords traffic to Adsense Sites.

Obviously there is a strong belief out there that Google frowns upon using AdWords to drive traffic to an AdSense site. The fact is that Google does not mind you using AdWords to send traffic to your AdSense site. Look at this post at Google’s official AdSense blog. In it they say

We’d like to share some of Peter’s insights with you about monetising his sites with AdSense and his experience using AdWords to attract visitors.

Clearly if Google is sharing stories about an AdSense publisher using AdWords, they do not frown upon this practice.

There is one thing that Google will ban your AdSense account for, however. They do not like it when you use AdWords to send traffic to a low quality site that displays AdSense. These types of sites are frequently referred to as MFAs (Made For AdSense). This is what Google had to say about this:

This new policy requirement doesn’t mean that you can’t use online advertising; it simply means that if you do, you need to be sure that the way you advertise meets with the guidelines, whether it’s through AdWords or through any other advertising program.

So how do you know what Google considers a “quality” site. You can read all about it at Google’s Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. The quality guidelines boil down to three things:

1. Original Content – Make sure the content is original and is relevant to any advertising you do.
2. Transparency – Make sure: your visitors know who there dealing with; don’t mess with their browsers or automatically download software; and have a clear privacy statement.
3. Navigation – Make sure you site is easy to navigate and doesn’t force them to click on ads to get away from you site.

Basically if you have a real website that you built for users, you will have no problems advertising with AdWords and keeping you AdSense account safe.

The Inside AdSense blog today announced that they now have a Known Issues page. This page lists anything that Google is aware of that may cause problems, and possible work arounds.

I’m not sure if this is something that they have been working on for a while and it was just a coincidence that they launched this the day they had a major reporting outage, or if they whipped this together today. My guess is that it’s the former.

This will be a good place to check out if you notice something amiss with AdSense. I’m sure today’s outage caused a lot of publisher to panic (Are my sites down? Did I get banned?) and this should help next time something like this happens.

If the first thing you do in the morning is log into your AdSense control panel, you probably had a little bit of a scare. It looks like the AdSense reports have not been updated since a little after midnight on pacific time. It does look like ads are still displaying normally, so I am assuming impressions and clicks are being counted, just not reported.

AdSense occasionally goes through reporting outages, but this one is much longer than normal.

Update: 3:00pm It looks like things are back to normal now.

When I launched my first website, it was an immediate success. It was on the first page of Google SERPs for the terms I thought it would, and it quickly shot up to a Page Rank 6. Was this because I was a skilled SEO? Not at all. I didn’t even no what the terms SEO and Page Rank meant. The first time someone pointed out that my site had a Page Rank of 6, I had to ask what that even was.

Why was this site so successful? I built a site that was actually informative and useful for people. I put a lot of hard work into building the content of the site and asked a lot of people for feedback. People liked the site so they linked to it. It quickly became an authority site in the eyes of Google.

I firmly believe that the best way to get traffic to a site is to have content that people actually want to see.

Does this mean that I think that SEO is useless? No, I think it has its place. If you are writing an article for your pet site about fantastic large dog breeds you might want to do a bit of keyword research. If your article was originally titled “Great Large Dog Breeds” and you do a bit of research and find that people actually search for “Best Large Dog Breed” a lot more than they search for “Great Large Dog Breeds” you may want to re-title your article. You also want to do things like make sure your site is easily spiderable by search engine robots.

My point is that when you originally conceive of a site you shouldn’t be thinking, “What will be a killer site for search engines?”, you should be asking “What will be a killer site for my visitors?”.

I just signed up for The Black Ink Project. It is a free online course on using affiliate programs. I usually don’t go for these types of things, but the pitch was pretty good. They weren’t saying it’s a get-rich-quick type of course, it seemed like it was very reasonable.

There will be 4 1-week modules in the course. Each module has 5 hour long sessions via WebEx conferences. After each week of sessions there is a week off to do “homework”.

Since it’s free I figured I have nothing to lose except a little time, and I might pick up some good information. There is limited space, so sign up now if you want to get in on it.