Avinashsing Sunkur Blog

Yeah, i finally made it. I wanted to break the $1000 mark and this morning when i checked my adsense stats, i had $1006 for the month of April 2008. This was one of my 2008 new year resolution as well, at least now i can say that i managed to fulfill one of those many resolutions that i always fail to honour every year

In just 4 months, i was able to reach that amount and that as well with only one website. Now my next goal is to reach the $1500 mark

Some backgrounds and styles that you can use to improve the appearance of your adsense ads and probably increase your click through rate (CTR).

Adsense backgrounds and styles

Many publishers spend a lot of time driving traffic to their website in the hope that they’ll earn more money from the Google Adsense programme and then find out that something went wrong in their calculations.

Double traffic = Double revenue (more or less)

However this is not the case all the time because of what is called Google Smart Pricing! If we say that a click on Ad X yields 50 cents, then with smart pricing you might end up getting 2 cents when somebody clicks on the same Ad X. Now this is ridiculous because all your effort in increasing your traffic has been wasted because you will need much more traffic and lots and lots of clicks to receive what you were earning with the low traffic in the past. This isn’t fun at all, is it?

Well smart pricing occurs if the visitors you are sending to the advertisor does not convert. What is essentially means is that if the advertiser wanted somebody to buy his product and none of them (or only a tiny amount) are buying the product, then it is not profitable for the advertisor. So Google has introduced a Smart Pricing algorithm to protect the advertisor by lowering the cost of ads.

Smart Pricing affects the whole Adsense account - so if one website is not converting very well, then all other websites associated with this account will be penalised. Evil Google!!!

Forget about everything you’ve heard about Smart Pricing and just focus on this sentence taken from the Google Adsense Team to clear your doubts:

” We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.”

And here are the official sources to back up what i said:

Facts about smart pricing from the Inside Adsense Team

How Smart Pricing works from Google Adwords

I’ve created a new page and placed it on my homepage hoping it will get indexed within 2 days but it didn’t.

MSN indexes faster than Google and Yahoo. The webpage got indexed in MSN in 6 days because even though the first crawl was on the 16th of March. Google crawled the page on the 16th as well and a little bit before MSN but the page is still not in Google’s index. Yahoo crawled the page on the 17th but it still doesn’t show up in index too.

Since i’ve got that page up, Google has crawled it just once, MSN four times and Yahoo twice.

Anyway, we’ll see when the page is going to show up in the other search engines.

Below are the logs for GoogleBot, MSNBot, Yahoo!Slurp and AskBot.

66.249.72.10 - - [16/Mar/2007:00:10:48 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 13399 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

65.55.209.205 - - [16/Mar/2007:15:58:23 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 13347 “-” “msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”

65.55.213.14 - - [18/Mar/2007:20:10:30 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 13347 “-” “msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”

65.54.188.139 - - [20/Mar/2007:19:45:52 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 13347 “-” “msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”

65.55.235.216 - - [20/Mar/2007:21:23:33 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 13347 “-” “msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”

74.6.85.231 - - [17/Mar/2007:04:06:28 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 13347 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”

74.6.70.72 - - [21/Mar/2007:13:18:02 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 13347 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”

65.214.44.157 - - [18/Mar/2007:10:34:18 -0500] “GET /learners/driving-instructor-training/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 13347 “-” “Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma; +http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml)”

Alright, there are two main values that are used in the rel attribute for the anchor tag: nofollow and external.

no follow
nofollow will tell search engines that this link is not trustworthy. So what means is that Google will not give any credit to this link for your site. It’s not going to pass any PR to your site but it might still bring you some traffic. Even if it shows as a backlink to your site, it’s of no value, remember that.

Here’s the URL that talks about it from Google Team:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

external
external is used to tell the browser to open this link in a new window. However JavaScript must be used to achieve this. But PR is still transferred

Internal linking can benefit a site a lot if done properly. So here is what i’ve learned:

Overall PageRank Power
The overall PageRank power is the PR that would be transferred to another site if all pages on your site linked to it. Say for example for you have website A which has a PR of 3 and you link to your disclaimer page (nobody else is going to link to that page besides you) on all pages on your site. The disclaimer page may get a PR 2 which eventually means that your overall PageRank power is 2. Now what this means is that if you are building a completely new site and it doesnt have a PR yet or is PR0, linking from your other site (overall PageRank 2) will give the new site a PR2.

http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/link_popularity/

http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/optimizing-internal-links/

Templates used by social networking sites have big fonts and shiny look. …

http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/3293

Here’s a webpage with all the SEO tools you need as a webmaster:

http://submitedge.com/seo_tools.html

From traffic analysis tools to PageRank calculation, you will find everything you need there. So be sure to check it out.

Rich Text Editor
http://www.unverse.net/wysiwyg.html

This year i’m going to focus on how to do better with Adsense. The two threads below from the DigitalPoint forums have valuable tips and i am storing the URLs here for reference.

Burta
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=207259

Game Producer
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=214339

Today i reached my first $100 landmark with Google Adsense. I launched my fancyAcar in March 2006 and today, after 8 months, i’m about to receive my first cheque from Google … hehe

I am still experimenting on what works best for maximum revenue from websites and soon i will be listing what has worked for me and what hasn’t.