AdSense Laboratory
Experiment 1: Zero
content pages
Aim: to find
out what ads appear on a completely blank page in two
different sites so as to get a closer understanding of how Google
decides what ads to place on your pages.
Notes: in the
table below are 3 links to blank pages on different
sites. The first links to a blank page on the Facts About
AdSense site. The second links to a blank page on the
Commercial Reality website. Facts About
AdSense .com is clearly about AdSense and related
topics. Commercial
Reality is a site I run to tell people about my internet
marketing consultancy business and is less clearly focused on a
particular theme.
These 2 links
are deliberately not labelled with a description because Google is
thought to assess a site's contents in part by the description
attached to the link. For example, the link in this sentence
is about Viral
Marketing. The fact that I have used the words "Viral
Marketing" to describe the hyperlink helps search engines
"understand" what the linked page is about.
The third link
is clearly labelled although it too leads to a blank page on the
Commercial Reality website called u.htm. Over time it will
be interesting to see if the ads are affected by the label
description but if this happens at all it will probably take some
months.
A fourth link
goes to a page on this site that is blank apart from a single
banner ad. There is no text underlying the ad although the
link is active. I don't expect it will have any impact on
the ads you see there - but let's find out.
To make sure that I
don't give Google any clues about the subject of the 2 blank pages
at all, I have simply labelled them t.htm on both sites.
The third page, although blank is called u.htm. However I
have labelled it "traffic generation", the reason
being that I know there are lots of AdWords ads about this topic
which means that there is no danger in public service ads
appearing simply due to shortage of supply.
Make
money with Ads by Google
|
Result:
It
didn't take Google long to respond as I suspected.
Anyway,
don't try this yourself because repeated attempts to do
things like this are reputed to be dangerous.
Ads
can still be relevant to your site even if you leave no
clues for Google to work out what your page is about. |
EXPERIMENT
STOPPED BY GOOGLE!
Google
sent me an email a day after this experiment began.
| While
reviewing your account we noticed that on www.factsaboutadsense.com
you are displaying Google AdSense ads on non-content-based
pages. This might include an error, opt-out, welcome, or
pop-up page, such as:
http://www.factsaboutadsense.com/t.htm
Google
AdSense crawlers aren't optimized to target ads to your
site content when you place the AdSense ad code on types
of pages that contain a limited amount of significant
content or information. In order to comply with AdSense
policy, please remove the AdSense ad code from any
non-content-based pages on your site immediately. |
So now you know.
(The following links no longer work.)
| Facts About AdSense link |
t.htm |
| Commercial Reality link |
t.htm |
| Commercial Reality labelled link |
traffic generation |
| Facts About AdSense link with banner |
u.htm |
Initial Results (10 minutes after posting pages):
- Facts About AdSense blank page: AdSense and AdWords ads
- Commercial Reality unlabelled blank page: Public Service
Ads
- Facts About AdSense banner page: AdSense and AdWords ads
- Commercial Reality labelled blank page: Public Service
Ads
These results are as expected but I'll need to check back later
on to see if any changes are made in the short term. Then
I'll need to keep an eye on the pages to see if anything changes
once the new pages have been spidered.
"Very" initial conclusion: to make sure that
Google posts ads that are highly relevant to your topic you need
to make sure that the overall site is clearly themed.
Final conclusion: the more Google
"understands" your site, the better the ads will be
targeted.
Don't forget that this impacts on the amount of money you earn
per click too due to the Content Relevance Factor. I cover
this in detail in The Definitive Guide to
Google AdSense. |