November 16, 2006 (IDG News Service) — Strange bedfellows Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have partnered to simplify how webmasters and online publishers submit their sites’ content for indexing in the companies’ search engines.

In a rare collaborative effort, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which compete directly in Internet search and other online services, plan to announce on Thursday their support for the open-source Sitemap Protocol, based on XML.

This protocol, which Google created and has been using for about 18 months, will be adopted by Yahoo effective Thursday, and the three companies will collaborate to extend and enhance it. Yahoo has been using another protocol, which it will continue to support. Microsoft will stop using its current protocol after it implements Sitemap Protocol in its search engine in early 2007.

A site map is a file that webmasters and publishers put on their sites to guide the search engines’ automated Web crawlers in properly indexing their Web pages.

Site maps are particularly useful in highlighting to crawlers the dynamic Web content that is served up on the fly. Crawlers generally index content contained in static Web pages without problems, but often they have difficulty with dynamic content, such as the one that is generated as a result of a search query.

A site map can be formatted using various protocols, but this means more work for webmasters and publishers, which is why Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are throwing their weight behind the Sitemap Protocol to promote it as a standard.

“The benefit for publishers is that they’ll get more of their content indexed more rapidly,” said Tim Mayer, Yahoo’s senior director of global search.

Meanwhile, the three companies believe the common protocol will improve site maps in general and along the way make their search engine crawlers more comprehensive in their indexing, a benefit that will trickle down to end users.

“Ultimately, what we care about is the best results for searchers and making things easy for site owners. This really does that,” said Vanessa Fox, product manager for Google’s Webmaster Central.

In addition to listing Web pages available for indexing, the Sitemap Protocol also lets publishers and webmasters include other relevant information, like when a page was last updated, how frequently it changes and what its importance level is on the site. All of this leads to more precise and effective crawling, the officials said.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo will encourage other search engine operators, as well as makers of related software, like content management systems vendors, to support the protocol, they said.

Offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, the protocol will be publicly available here starting Thursday.

Selecting The Wrong Topics

When I first started out with AdSense, I was one eager beaver. I wanted to create as many pages as I could, and I didn’t care what topic they were about as long as it wasn’t adult or gambling.

I put up a site on Old Time Radio Shows, and I was excited to see that I made a few dollars a month with it. What I didn’t realize at the time is that my $0.10 clicks were the bottom of the proverbial AdSense barrel in terms of earnings.

I didn’t know then that it paid to research the good, high paying topics. So I just put up sites on whatever I could think of that seemed easy to rank for in the search engines.

I was shooting myself in the foot! Once I realized that I could do a little keyword research and find out how much the keywords were worth, then I started focusing on the higher paying niches and started seeing the $1, $2, $5, $10 clicks and up. I don’t get that much with every click, but often enough to keep me very happy!

So research your topics first using the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool, or a good high paying keywords list such as Keyword Explosion.

Too Many Topics on One Site

Another mistake I see newbies make very often (and I made myself when I was a newbie) is having too many topics put on one website. I’ve seen sites that target everything from alphalpha to Zoro!

That’s a bad idea for two main reasons:

1. It makes it hard to optimize your site.You want your domain name to be targetted to the topic of the site (a great search engine optimization technique). If you have every manner of topic on the site, you can’t do this and lose out on the power that a great domain name can have with the search engines.
2. Google’s Smart Pricing doesn’t like it.If you’re not familiar with it, SmartPricing is what Google uses to figure out how much your page is worth in relation to the ads showing on the page. The more Smart Pricing likes your pages, the more you will get paid per click.

   One of the things I’ve seen with Smart Pricing is that it likes tightly focused, targetted sites. You might have a lot of pages on one site, but they need to be related to each other.

“But I can’t afford more than one domain right now,” you might protest.

If that’s the case, the best thing you can do is to create subdomains for each of the categories that your site targets.

For example, if you have a site that targets “alphalpha” and “Zoro”, have two subdomains:

http://alphalpha.mydomain.com/
http://zoro.mydomain.com/

Do not have the subdomains link to each other either. That way Google seems them as seperate “mini-sites”.

Be Careful What Kind of Traffic You Send To Your Sites

Not all traffic sources are created equal. There are a lot of sites out there selling “one hundred thousand visitors to your site for $49.95!” and the like.

What most of these sites do is use software to “simulate” a visit to your site. They are not real people. I’ve tested this extensively with a couple of vendors who sell this kind of traffic, and not once have I ever gotten any “real” people.

The problem is that sometimes those bots goof and “click” the ads by following the links.

Google sometimes sees those clicks as fraudulent, and many a new AdSense publisher has lost his account because of it.

So beware of shady or “too good to be true” traffic promises, they will only hurt you!

Focus on search engine optimization and link trading, that’s where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck.

1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad unit and 1 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches - Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing - Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported - Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

Most webmasters know that Adsense generates a sizeable source of additional advertising income. That is why most of them use it to go after high paying keywords. They have with them the lists that tells what the keywords are and have already used various methods of identifying them. And yet, after putting up these supposed-to-be high paying keywords into their pages, the money they expected to come rolling in is not really coming in.

What is it that they are doing wrong?

Having the pages is with the proper keywords is one thing. But driving visitors to those pages is another matter and often the factor that is lacking.

The thing is, to get visitors to your high paying keyword pages, you need to optimize your site navigation.

Stop for a moment and think about how visitors are using your website. After a visitor has landed on a certain page, they have the tendency to click on another page that sounds interesting. They get there because of the other links that appears on a page that they initially landed on. This is site navigation. It is all about enabling visitors to move about your site. And one way of maximizing your Adsense earnings.

A typical website have menu links on each page. The wording on these links is what grabs a visitor’s attention and gets them to click on one of the links that will take them to another page of that website. Links that have “free’ or “download” are oftentimes good attention-grabbers.

This navigation logic can also be applied to driving traffic to your high paying pages. There are some websites that are getting a lot of traffic from search engines, but have low earnings. The trick is to try and use come cleverly labeled links to get the visitors off that pages and navigate them to the higher earning ones. This is one great way of turning real cheap clicks to real dollars.

Before you begin testing if this same style will work for you and you website, you need to have two things. Something to track and compare and some high earning pages you want to funnel your site traffic to. An option is to select a few of your frequently visited pages. This is ensuring fast result to come by.

Now, the next thing to do is think of ways to get visitors viewing a particular page to try and click on the link that will take them to your high earning pages. Come up with a catchy description for that link. Come up with a catchy and unique description for the link. Think of something that people do not get to see everyday. That will trigger their curiosity enough to try and see what that was all about.

You can also use graphics to grab your readers’ attention. There is no limitation to what you can do to make your link noticeable. If you are after the success of your site, you will do everything it takes just to achieve that goal. Just be creative. As far as many Adsense advertisers are concerned, there are no written and unwritten laws to follow regarding what they write. Just as long as you do not overstep the guidelines of the search engines, then go for it.

Also remember that it is all about location, location and location. Once the perfect attention grabbing description has been achieved, you have to identify the perfect spot on your page to position that descriptive link to your high paying page.

There is nothing wrong with visiting other websites to see how they are going about maximizing their site navigation. “Hot pages” or “Most read” lists are very common and overly used already. Get to know the ones that many websites are using and do not try to imitate them.

Another way of doing it is to try and use different texts on different pages. That way you will see the ones that work and what does not. Try to mix things around also. Put links on top and sometimes on the bottom too. This is how you go about testing which ones get more clicks and which ones are being ignored.

Let the testing begin. Testing and tracking until you find the site navigation style that works best for you site.

ToonChooi Tan

Webmaster of 10 Real Adsense Secrets To Triple Your Adsense CTR. Visit Free Niche Marketing Tips now to for various niche marketing tips. You may subscribe to his 6 part Niche Marketing Course which will reveal the insider tips and tactics that will show you how to find Hot and Untapped Niche Markets with Ease

Jim at Reve News has learned the lesson that most bloggers writing about making money from blogs has learned - Adsense doesn’t pay well on these types of blogs.

‘On ReveNews that is. Let this be a lesson to the other publishers out there. Never try to run Adsense on a site that is read by people who are Adsense experts, let alone a site read by affiliate marketers. Geez, talk about a pathetic click rate. I haven’t seen something fail so badly since Gigli.

Putting Adsense into our content was an experiment by me to see if it could work for us, even though I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t, I had to find out. I’ve learned my lesson and have removed 98% of all the Google ads off of the sit’

If you want to make big money via Adsense I’d pick another topic - readers of such blogs are remarkably blind to Adsense ads and the ads themselves are notoriously poorly paying.

Jim also gives a case study of a ‘typical blogger using adsense’ in his post where he shows how little the average blogger will earn using Adsense. His figures talk hypothetically of a blogger with 1000 impressions per day, with a 10% CTR and a 2 cents per click payment earning $730 per year.

Nothing wrong with the maths - the only problem is that there is such variation between blogs on almost every element of the equation. CTR can vary widely - but 10% is probably an over estimation looking at most of my blogs. 2 cents per click is an estimate that varies widely also (it’s probably an under estimate looking at my blogs).

For example - I’ve got a few blogs that hit the 1000 impressions per day mark.

One earns an average of $15 per day, another earns an average of $5 per day and another earns an average of $2 per day. Each are niche blogs - none will probably ever be massive.

Jim concludes his post by writing:

‘Forget Adsense, Bloggers are better served creating custom partnerships or sponsorships with advertisers. In arrangements of this nature, a blog with niche-specific content, that is straddled with low traffic, has the opportunity to earn much more by converting less.’

Jim is right that the average blogger’s Adsense earnings will never be massive - but I would differ from his argument slightly on a number of points also:

1. The average blogger won’t earn big money from custom partnerships or sponsorships with advertisers either. As someone who has worked hard at developing relationships with sponsors I’ve found that many of them are not willing to talk to anyone with a site doing only 1000 impressions per day. I also know how much work it can be to get these sorts of deals. It can take along time and a lot of effort to both get the deal and to maintain the relationships. In comparison to adding a little Adsense code to a template (and then forgetting about it) I’m wondering about the rate of return on effort.

Of course there are systems like blogads (that Jim mentions in his post) but these won’t earn big dollars either for the average blogger. For instance if you take a look at what bloggers are charging for ads over at blogads for their blogs that are averaging 7000 impressions per week - the average ad is around $25 per week ($3.5) per day. Of course some of the blogs at around that traffic level have more than 1 ad, (some have up to 4) but other have no ads at all.

‘d love Jim to prove me wrong, but I fail to see how relatively small blogs will ever earn much from sponsorships. I do see the advantages of some of the ways people are working together as networks to attract advertisers - but even so, on a ‘per impression basis’ I doubt that their earnings will be large.

2. Even if sponsorships and partnerships do earn more (and I’ve no doubt in some cases they will) I’d argue that there is no reason to ‘forget Adsense’ - rather bloggers would be better served to keep earning their few dollars per day from it in addition to developing custom relationships with sponsors and partners.

I guess what it comes down to is the fact that if your blog is doing 1000 impressions per day that you’ll never become rich - no matter what revenue stream you may choose to run on it. Your only real option to significantly increase your earnings at this level of blogging is to find ways to increase your traffic or add new blogs to what you do.

Interested in other’s thoughts