Making Money Online... not

Adsense smartpricing and Adwords landing page quality

People delight in telling us that nothing on the Internet is static. It is an ever changing world. These people are right! All successful Internet businesses must review and adapt their business models, products and philosophies in the ever evolving Internet marketplace. Google is no exception to this. For example, users of the AdSense and Adwords products often see new features being added to the product interfaces.

However, with Google it is the changes to their products which we do not see that can be just as important. As a rule, people waste far too much time talking in forums about what might or might not be going on under the bonnet, deep in the Google algorithms. Much non-productive chat regarding page rank, keyword density and variable anchor text. It is probably not useful for the average AdSense publisher to dwell too deeply on such black arts. Time can be better spent adding good quality unique content to your sites. This is not to say that we should remain ignorant of Google’s workings and it is useful to have some insight into the product and philosophy changes at Google over the last year. These changes are mainly driven by the desire to increase the quality of users search results. These mainly include features to help reduce the number of unhelpful and uninformative web sites finding of their way into the search engine result pages.

A certain breed of website has begun to feature more prominently in the average users Internet experience. These web sites, often known as MFA or Made for AdSense, do not add value or content to the Internet, they simply exist to make money. In fact, the more the webmaster is motivated by high AdSense earnings for little effort, the more likely it is that his website is of little value, even if it is not a full blown MFA. Google has taken steps to reduce the frequency that Internet users come across such sites and, perhaps more importantly, publishers and advertisers from are penalized for running such sites.

One of these changes has become known in the AdSense community as smartpricing. This simply means that if the traffic from a publisher’s AdSense site is deemed to be poorly converting or low quality traffic then the originating publisher will have his cost per click earnings significantly reduced. In practice this means that if a publisher simply presents a web user with a page of adverts, leaving no choice except to click on the adverts, it is likely that these users will be predominantly poor quality traffic compared to Internet users which click on and AdSense advert because they were motivated by the content they were reading on the publisher’s web site. Publishers which end up getting smart-priced often find their earnings per click collapsing by perhaps a factor of 100

It is not just the publishers. Google is also now making efforts to judge the quality of the landing page that the Internet user arrives at by clicking on a contextual advert. If the landing page has good content and is relevant to the keywords the Internet user was searching on (plus factor in the content of the advert) then the Google algorithms will decide that this is a good landing in page. If a landing page is deemed to be off irrelevant or poor quality then Google will hand out punishment. You’ll be asked to pay disproportionately high costs per click. Thus, advertisers who attempt to deceive Internet users by drawing traffic using low paying keywords to sites featuring adverts with higher paying (albeit it less relevant) keywords will find that their costs become prohibitively high.

Using this two pronged attack Google will hopefully be able to significantly reduce the number of spam web sites which Internet users encounter whilst searching the Internet. Of course it is impossible to stop everybody but if even half such websites disappeared then the Internet would be a much better place.