Web Blog of Greg Mathews

Strange things appear to happen on the yzoo.co.uk site, February really done well and so did the first month of March but then Boom.

For some reason Google dropped all of the yzoo.co.uk results pages from their index, only listing the html sitemaps.

This had a devastating effect, traffic dropped from a peak of 80,000 page impressions/day to 7000/day and this has been steady every since (about 6 weeks). Well until I decided to make a few minor changes to the site this week.

WOW, it’s amazing, within a few days my traffic is back up to 70,000 impressions a day.

The moral of the story is don’t give up, if your site disappears from google or any other SE, then play around with your site a bit, see what changes can be made.

I posted this in response to a post on a forum recently.

I believe Adsense is going down hill, but realistically online what other alternatives are there for publishers?

1. Adbrite

I’ve only just started placing adbrite on my site but it concerns me that if you have an ad unit with 4 ads and Adbrite charge say $5/ad for a week, you will just earn $10/week as 50% of income goes to Adbrite. Adbrite does adjust the cost of the ad automatically based on various factors but as an example, my site with an average of 10,000 impressions a day would need the cost of an add to be $100/ad per week so I can earn the same as I do from Adsense.

In addition, I have not yet seen an Adbrite network ad on my site, Adbrite are just placing my Adsense code that I provided which makes me wonder if they even have advertisers willing to pay the same as those on Adsense.

2. Yahoo Publishers Network

This looks like it could be a good alternative but as it is US only I can’t comment.

3. Commission Junction

I looked at these a few months ago with the intention of using a script to dispaly CJ advertisers based on the content of the page. (my own context advertising script). Firstly I found it time consuming finding enough advertisers that where suitable for my site to enable me to display different advertisers. Secondly, I started getting emails from either CJ or the advertisers themselves saying that the specific ads I had selected are no longer being used or they are no longer advertising through CJ. This meant I had to go back and change/delete the advertisers from my site and find replacement ads. In the end I stopped using CJ and reverted to Adsense so I do not know what earnings could have made.

4. Other Affiliate Programs

This has similar problems to CJ, you need to spend time finding enough GOOD Affiliate programs that relate to your content and so the same ad is not constantly being displayed, this is again very time consuming and not something I have really tried to do yet.

I have written (well almost finished) a perl ‘context ads’ script simular to adsense and adbrite but again finding enough advertisers to build a viable advertising network is not the easiest of things to do.

If you know if a good alternative to Adsense then I would love to hear about it.

Reading through forums I have often seen posts from people thinking about designing a site around high value keywords with the intention of earning good returns from context advertising such as Google Adsense.

Well I say Forget about high paying keywords, work on a site you know about and build on that, keeping it fresh and informative. Work on developing a site first that you can keep updating with unique content and then consider adding advertising after, do not do it the other way around.

You need traffic to earn anything from advertising on a site, generally most of that traffic would come from the search engines and other related sites.

If you concentrate on high paying keywords you will have far more competition when trying to do well in the search engines. Let me try to give an example:

You create a site based on the keyword ‘Mesothelioma’, now per click you will probably earn a good figure as it is a high value keyword, but to get listed on the first page of the Google SERPs you have to compete with more than 14 million other urls.

Now consider the keyword ‘guitar tabs’, probably not a high value keyword but far less competition in the Google SERPs, just under 2 million urls.

To earn from adsense, or any kind of advertising, you need the traffic, the higher up the SERPs you are the more traffic you are likely to get, the better your content the more inbound links you will get. As there are far less sites competing for the #1 spot in the SERPs for the keyword ‘guitar tabs’ you have more chance of getting on the first page of the search results, it still takes work but it will be a lot easier than if you based your site on the keyword ‘Mesothelioma’.

In turn, as you are positioned better you will get more traffic, more traffic then leads to more clicks.

I know from experience that this is the case, I have a number of pages on one of my websites that contain high value keywords but I get very little traffic, the same site has low value keywords but get far more traffic from which my adsense ads get more exposure and I earn more from these pages.

By all means if you are a ‘Mesothelioma’ expert and have the knowledge and expertise to maintain a site on the subject then go a head and you could do well, but you will need to work hard.