Google Adsense Experiences

[sjwinslow]

I am posting this in the hope that my experiences will help other TNGers.

I recently had my free hosting company experience a long outage. The length was long enough to convince me to move to a more reliable paid service. At the same time I purchased a URL.

Going from a hobby that was basically free to now several fees that need to be paid caused me to think about a way to pay for all this. Adsense by Google seemed like the obvious solution.

Adsense places context relevant advertisements on your site and pays a small fee when someone clicks links associated with the ads. Adding the code that Google provides to the various parts of my website was not difficult. But getting the ads to match the content of the site was a bit more challenging.

My site is made up of static html pages, TNG and a phpbb forum. The html and the forum seemed to track very nicely, presenting mostly genealogy type advertisements. However, since I had gone to great lengths to develop a site map and a robots.txt file that would direct the searchbots to only specific pages, the ad targeting on those pages was abysmal. Since the bots were blocked from scanning most of the TNG pages, Google defaults to the URL for a clue as to what the site is about. My URL is http://winslowtree.com. Google seemed to like picking up on the tree portion of the URL and usually presented ads about tree pruning services rather than genealogy family trees.

Although, I don’t have the problem totally solved it is significantly better now and seems to get slightly better with passing time. The solution was to remove the restrictiveness of the robots.txt file and change the recently installed meta-tags that blocked the searchbots from accessing my site. Specifically, the robots.txt file allows searchbots access to all sections of my site with the simple entry of:

user-agent: *

disallow:

Modifying the meta-tags required editing the tngrobots.php file to stop applying the noindex and nofollow entries that are now the default for many of the TNG pages. The results after only one day following the new modifications is that most of the TNG pages are now presenting ads that are relevant to the content of the TNG page, except for just a few. These being the Browse Photos (not much text) and Browse Documents (of which I don’t have any) that make sense but a few that don’t. The ones that still aren’t working correctly but that I think should, are the Browse Notes and the What’s New. Time may still be needed for these to come into alignment.

Of course the biggest problem I have now is the lack of traffic since I accentually have a new site a far as the search engines are concerned. I’ve only received about 50 visits from people referred from search engines in the last month. Even though my site is being crawled frequently by the search engines, I’m still in the 6 month freeze period before they will display any significant number of my sites pages in their index. I also think Yahoo has me blocked because I used some page redirection to send people who were trying to locate my old site to my new site. But right now I get many more hits from the redirects than I do from the search engines. Later I'll remove the redirects and ask for forgiveness.

[steve30000]

I just signed up for a Google Adsense account yesterday after all the talk about it on the email list. I'll be curious to see how it works out. I'm sure I'll be serving plenty of ads for vacuum cleaners.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

I thought I would post a 1-month update on the progress of using Adsense on my genealogy site.

For the most part I'm happy with the results. From a revenue standpoint, if the current rate stays consistent then I should have enough earnings at the end of the year to pay for the hosting and URL fees and maybe a TNG upgrade. So you can tell I'm not getting rich off the ads, but then that was never the objective.

Tweaking the ad placement and color definitely helps with click-through rate. The location of the ads is obviously the most important variable with the color the second most important. I'm still experimenting with the color but it looks like keeping the link and background color of the adds similar to the theme of the site is the best combination.

I don't believe genealogy sites will run as high of click through rates as other types of sites because we get so many repeat visitors. The repeat visitor seems to become blind to the ads very quickly and ignores them. My site currently runs only about 50 unique visits per day and almost 90% of the visitors reach the site through a direct address or bookmark. This high number of repeat visitors are good for loyalty but not so good at clicking ads.

Steve

[steve30000]

Well, my luck hasn't been as good. I've had over 2000 ads served and no click throughs. Think I need to work on placement. The postnuke site seems to be causing some problems as well as google seems to have a lot of trouble determining what is going on in some of the blocks.

I was kidding in my last post, but I just checked and my ads were for:

Hoover Vacuums - HSN

Hoover Vacuums and Accessories at HSN.com. Shop online today.

www.hsn.com

Hoover Wind Tunnel

Large Selection of Brushes, Parts, Bags & More! Free Shipping Over $50

www.totalvac.com

[sjwinslow]

Here are a couple of small things that I believe helped the relevance of the ads. First I noticed that there was really very little context I had control of on the most popular TNG page, the getperson.php. But I was able to change a few things that I believe helped because the ads have gotten significantly more targeted after the changes.

1. Even though the database has an ID of Winslow on my site I was able to rename the tree to Winslow Genealogy, Ancestry & Heritage. This is displayed on every getperson.php page now.

2. I made a change to the title and description meta tags as described here http://www.tngforum.us/index.php?showtopic=712# but I also added the text "Genealogy for " in the message also to produce <title>Genealogy for Stephen Winslow, Sr. b. Texas d. </title>

3. I stopped the normal keyword meta tag and put my own in the meta.html file to get better keywords for Adsense.

4. Because of the way the getperson.php file is formatted and displayed on my site. I only have adsense adds in the header and footer. The header contains a link unit and the footer contains 728X90 Leader board. I only get frequent hits on the header, almost none on the much larger leader board. It is obvious that footers do not pay off at all. This will be my next area to work to improve.

Doing all the above, it took about three weeks for Google to figure out that my site was about genealogy and not Tree Pruning that it was picking up from my URL http://winslowtree.com. Obviously, if you haven't picked a url yet and you plan to use Adsense, think very hard about the words in your url. Google looks at the url as a default if it can't figure what your site is about. As I mentioned before, making the ads look as much like the theme of your site helps a lot as well. I don't think people like having the ads blasted in their face. Subtle is much better.

I hope these suggestions help and if anyone has any other suggestions that has worked for them I'd love to hear them.

Steve

[PalmBeachG]

Well, I started Feb. 17, approximately a month ago, and have practically no money coming. I just checked on my statistics, for February and this is what it said:

February, starting on Feb. 17, 2006:

Impressions Clicks PageCPR PageEcpm Earnings

Totals 275 5 1.8% $0.00 $0.00

March 1- March 23, 2006

Totals 340 2 0.6% $1.61 $0.55

So according to this I earned 55 cents; I have not received it yet, nor do I know what the formula is for payment; I really haven't had time to read it yet. But the search engines are not really picking my site up yet; just the TNG links from other members. So maybe it will pick up.

I have done a button to ancestry.com before on another website and usually get $15.00 a month, but that is with excessive amount of links that I don't like to do (like pure adverstising), and it takes away from your site to have that many links.

[sjwinslow]

Google indicates that you must have $100.00 in your account before they will send you a check.

Having traffic to the site is my problem as well. You can see below the cpanel indicates non-search bot traffic to my site will most likely be less than about 20,000 page views for the month of March. While Google indicates that I've had 6,628 page impressions. My guess is that cpanel is not removing all the search bot traffic is the reason for the difference in traffic, as almost every page on my site has an ad.

Unique visitors.......724

Number of visits...1302 (1.79 visits/visitor)

Pages................14654 (11.25 pages/visit)

Hits...................46476 (35.69 hits/visit)

Bandwidth...........568.48 MB (447.09 KB/visit)

If some how I could get page impressions up to 20,000 per month and a click trough rate of .6% for example, that would equate to 120 clicks or maybe $25 per month.

P.S. Be careful posting your actual earning as it is against the Google TOS. Also don't click your own ads, Google will ban you for doing that.

One thing I find interesting from the cpanel stats is the ratio of people who access my site from a bookmark/direct address compared those that find it through a search engine.

Origin_________________Pages_Percent __Hits__Percent

Direct address / Bookmarks 5277__93.4 %__7010__88.6 %

Links from Search Engine......266___4.7 %___266___3.3 %

- Google................................214

- Yahoo...................................38

- Google (Images)....................6

- MSN.......................................4

- Unknown search engines......3

- AltaVista................................1

Links from an external page.104___1.8 %____633___8 %

I have taken over 100,000 hits from Googlebot this month and its used over 2.25 GB of bandwidth crawling my site, while I receive less than 5% of my page views from all search engines. I realize that Google is still indexing my site's pages and not all of those crawled are displayed or searchable in Google's index but that is still a very wide gap between the amount resources it uses for the return I receive.

Maybe this is telling me that activities like a news letter will bring more traffic to a genealogy type site than search engines. I have a mailing list of over 200 people who have contacted me in the past, I may just try a test next month with a news letter and see how well it works.

Steve

[arnold]

I have taken over 100,000 hits from Googlebot this month and its used over 2.25 GB of bandwidth crawling my site, while I receive less than 5% of my page views from all search engines. I realize that Google is still indexing my site's pages and not all of those crawled are displayed or searchable in Google's index but that is still a very wide gap between the amount resources it uses for the return I receive.

Steve,

I looked at your showlog.php file and see that your website is hit as often as ours is. For us, this has been going on since August 2005 and yet only a small part of our website is in Google's index. When I write to Google about this mismatch, the standard reply is that a visit by the googlebot does not guarantee that that file will be indexed. It does not make sense to me, but this is the business plan Google is happy with.

Others on this forum have complained about how much bandwidth Google takes.

[sjwinslow]

Steve,

I looked at your showlog.php file and see that your website is hit as often as ours is. For us, this has been going on since August 2005 and yet only a small part of our website is in Google's index.

Arnold,

Your site has a very clean uncluttered look that I like a lot. I also like your FAQ. I've noticed that many people on my site spend a lot of time viewing the html pages on my site but when they go to the TNG pages they soon leave. I have wondered if the diverse functionality of the site overwhelms many people. I may look into more help files and FAQ to help people locate what they are looking for.

I feel I've been very fortunate to get Google to crawl my site as quickly as it did and post as many link as it has in their index to my site. I am a little surprised that I receive so few visitors from search engine queries. My previous site was located on a free host that limited me to 500 meg of bandwidth each month. This caused me to block most of the search engines a good portion of the time. I had always attributed the low query rate coming from search engines to the fact that I limited their access to my site.

However, now that I have moved to a host that allows 5 Gb per month, I'm not finding much additional pay off for all the bandwidth the crawlers are using. Even with 5 Gb I must limit the crawlers to just three types of TNG pages (surname-all, search & getperson) or I would be overwhelmed with crawlers.

I don't really believe the low visitor rate (only about 5%) I receive from search engines is their fault. I just don't think there are all that many people out there searching for Winslows that don't already know about my site. I have done a lot of promoting of the site on all of the genealogy bulletin boards and mailing lists because I coordinate the Winslow Y-DNA project and are continually trying to recruit people for the project through the site. My site stats show that the vast majority of the visitors come to my site either through the use of a bookmark or directly keying in http://winslowtree.com.

When I look at overture.com "Winslow" was only searched for 2100 times in February and I have received 281 page visits from people through search engines. That would seem to be a reasonable click through rate. If I can keep the bandwidth usage under control and increase the number of getperson.php pages in their index, I'll be satisfied picking up a few new people each month who have not seen the site.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

With the first full month of Adsense ads included on my genealogy site, I have been generally happy with the results. The month of March included the following updates to the site to make it more conducive to Adsense.

* Sitemap and robots.txt optimized for Adsense

* Adsense Link unit added to the top of every page.

* Adsense Ad unit added to the footer of each page.

* All Adsense color schemes set to match site's theme

* The meta description tags modified to include the words "Genealogy for" for better ad targeting

* The Meta keywords changes for better search engine and Adsense targeting

* The database name changed from Winslow to "Winslow Genealogy, Ancestry & Heritage" (targeting)

The modifications that have been included for April observations is:

* Random photos added to footer to draw attention to the ads at the bottom of the page.

Additionally, I noted before that the Click Through Rate (CTR) rates seems lower for my genealogy site than most other type of sites. Although I believe the common CTR measurement may be a reasonable benchmark for comparing to other sites, it may not be a good metric to measure improvement from month to month on a genealogy site.

CTR is calculated in percent as the number of click throughs divided by page impressions. As the number of page impressions increase, the natural thinking is, more opportunities to click an ad. I think with the general website this is a good measure where someone searches a key phrase, visits the site and views a page or two, (don't) finds the info their looking for and moves on. On a genealogy site, a single researcher may view dozens of pages before moving on.

From my stats I've noticed that the most frequent visitor is on the site is from 0-30s (52.8%). I think this is a pretty representative number of all web sites. (i.e., Someone does a search, and finds a site that has nothing to do with what they are looking for and continues searching.) However, of the next three segments of time; 30s-2mn(10.4%), 2mn-5mn(8.5%), 5mn-15mn(10.9%) the most common length of time someone stays on the site is 5mn-15mn. This is enough time to look at 10-50 genealogy pages. Also about the same number of people stay from 15mn-1h, enough time to view at over 100 pages. That says over 20% of the visitors (and 59% of the "real" visitors that stay longer than 30s) to my site are viewing a significant number of pages. (the showlog also indicates this as well)

I believe what I would call a "Unique Click through" (UCTR), where the number of click throughs is divided by the number of unique visitors is much better at determining if changes made to the site improves ad clicks. UCTR leaves out all the volatility of one person visiting the site and looking through many pages before they potentially click an ad and leave the site. This still allows the focus to be on the two main components of site optimization for ads (the number of visitors and the rate they click on ads) without significant daily swings in the metric.

Steve

[Jpaprocki]

You need to remember something about people who visit your site are most likely looking for information. If they are confronted with a load of ads, chances are you wont see them again and yes word does get around.

Also people who are looking for info want just that, info. Chances are they already know about the the Big ancestory companys that you need to subsribe to before you get any good information. There are only a few so they probably wont be presented with anything new.

My advise is not to put any ads on your site and you will most likely get more repeat folks. If you instist on trying to generate money from your site, try the affiliate approach with a software for genealogy or something like that.

Good luck in whatever you decide. :)

[rdmorss]

Going from a hobby that was basically free to now several fees that need to be paid caused me to think about a way to pay for all this.

All hobbies have expenses - some more than others (any golfers, bowlers, hunters, or fishermen out there?). Not sure how much genealogy you were doing for free. Even before the days of computers there were expenses: photocopies; postage; fees for copies of public records; long distance phone calls; office supplies; gas, food and lodging for research trips; photo film and processing; printing costs (if you published your results); subscriptions to historical and genealogy societies; reference books and magazines.

When personal computers came along (but before the internet) there was the cost of the hardware and software. Now with the internet there is your ISP fee and webhosting (if you decide to publish online). Is there something about webhosting that comprises the "last straw" so that now people feel a need to recover their hobby costs?

I agree with Jpaprocki. In my experience, ads on personal/hobby websites aren't worth the trouble, and tend to annoy your visitors. I've had a personal domain since 1998 and was like everyone else at first, thinking I should at least be able to generate enough income to pay my internet expenses. I regret spending all the time researching affiliate programs - time which would have been more enjoyably spent pursuing my hobbies.

[arnold]

I strongly second what Jpaprocki and Robert say.

I'll further add that when I see ads on a genealogical website, I quietly say, "Outta here," and off I go somewhere else.

If running a website were expensive, then I would have patience for "Going from a hobby that was basically free to now several fees that need to be paid caused me to think about a way to pay for all this." However, in the scheme of things, paying around $5.00 a month for web hosting and paying around $5.00 a year for a Domain Name is, in truth, pretty close to free.

Go to the website I run. I pay a tad over twenty cents a day. See what twenty cents a day gets me!!! Do you really think that I want to place advertisements in order to save a pittance? I hope that you will reconsider your position and be pleased to provide a helpful service to your visitors.

[sjwinslow]

It’s good to hear comments from some site owners who would prefer not to place ads on their sites. I felt like there must be a silent majority out there since a review of the TNG sites indicated that most do not have ads.

I view the placement of the ads as an interesting study more than a real source of revenue (especially given the amount revenue we’re talking about, $14 for the month of March). Obviously, I enjoy genealogy research, the interaction with the people who visit the site and send me emails and seeing what subjects they are interested in beyond my site.

In the short term, I believe Adsense has brought more people to my site than if I had not placed the ads (we’ll have to see about the long term). There is no doubt in my mind that Google crawled and indexed my site much faster than if I had not placed ads on the site. The site has a Google page rank of 2 after a month and a half of being on-line. This has allowed more people searching for the type of content on my site to actually locate the site.

Although sites can be set up where the ads are very distracting, they can also provide a service to users. I’ve noticed that the highest click through rate on any page on my site occurs on the coat of arms page. Unfortunately, I’m not able to interview the people who have clicked the ads displayed on this page but I believe it is a safe assumption that they did not find all the information they desired on my site. Since the ads on this page usually display other sites with coat of arms information I believe they went off in the search of their needs. Will they come back to my site?—maybe/maybe not.

I’ve tried to also find out if the ads annoyed frequent visitors. There is a poll in the Forum on my site asking for anonymous opinions and I have inquired of some who email me from time to time; what their reaction to the ads are? There has only been one response to the poll (it was positive) and all of the inquiries have come back positive to the ads. Unfortunately, I don’t put too much weight on the responses to direct inquiries. It’s a little bit like asking someone if they think your baby is pretty? However, if I had received a negative response from a frequent visitor, I would have taken it very seriously.

Please don’t take this topic the wrong way. My intent is not to convert people to Adsense or to placing any kind of ad on their site. I had seen in the email list that some had interest in including Adsense on their site. This forum seemed like a good place to post some of my experiences and a way to discuss what works and some of the pitfalls with others with interest. In my search of the net, there is a lot of information on Adsense and its use on blogs, forums and commercial sites but very little on genealogy sites. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t work well on one. I want to find out and post that information for others.

Steve

[Jpaprocki]

Just want you to know I wasn't being critical of anyone placing adsense on their site. It's a good way to earn some cash. Just passing on my experiences.

I believe Adsense has brought more people to my site than if I had not placed the ads (we’ll have to see about the long term). There is no doubt in my mind that Google crawled and indexed my site much faster than if I had not placed ads on the site.

Unless they have changed the way adsense works, it doesn't bring traffic to your site. I just displays ads that others have paid for on your site. I don't know of if sites that have adsense running on them get indexed faster or not. If you have a site map I know it will.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck with it. I made some nice money by using it on a classifieds site I had at one time so I know it can work. :)

[sjwinslow]

... Unless they have changed the way AdSense works, it doesn't bring traffic to your site. I just displays ads that others have paid for on your site. I don't know of if sites that have AdSense running on them get indexed faster or not...

I have read the same thing and even similar information can be found in Google's Adsense information. However, my observation of the action of Google's index makes me questing that thinking. (Bear with me as the explanation is a little long)

My site has just over 10,000 people in the database and my robots.txt and sitemap files gives Google only two ways to look at each (search and getperson; observing the showlog seems to confirm this). That should mean that if Google crawls each person before starting over (this is truly an unknown, but an assumption for now) within 20,000 page views, Google should crawl all the possible pages. Since my site was put on line in mid-February Google has viewed over 150,000 pages. This should mean that Google has crawled each page about 15 times. (less than 200 of these can be found in Google's index when doing a search)

There are a number of ancestors that visitors view and search more frequently than others in my database. Since the vast majority (about 95%) of the visitors to my site get there from referal links, bookmarks or directly keying in the home page url, I believe most of these popular ancestors are being found using the TNG search rather than a Google search. Additionally, once a visitor lands on a ancestor page, the Google Adsense bot does a quick read of the page to determine its context to be able to display the appropriate ads.

A check of the getperson pages from my site that can be found currently indexed on Google are mostly these popular ancestors. Now if people didn't find these couple of hundred popular ancestors using Google's search engine, how did Google know these 200 out of 10,000 were popular? I think there is bleed-through between what the Adsense bot found as frequently visited pages to the Google index. Additionally, from a business standpoint, if you were Google (and you also make money from people clicking on ads) wouldn't you want the most popular pages being displayed to be included in your index and if your Adsense bot had that information why not use it.

I'm sure a lot of arguments can be made against this observation and admititly it is just an observation with a number of assumptions. But the explanation seems to match what I'm seeing. Maybe someone has a better explanation. I'm only reporting what I've seen and maybe my interpretation it totally wrong.

Steve

[Rush]

Just to piggy back on that:

I've read more than I ever care to about the suspected inner workings of the Google search engine and indexing. What I do know is after 6 months I finally got one person listed under a 'getperson' url. Whoo hooo!

From what I've read, dynamic pages index slower, sometimes a lot.

Rush

[sjwinslow]

Just to piggy back on that:

I've read more than I ever care to about the suspected inner workings of the Google search engine and indexing. What I do know is after 6 months I finally got one person listed under a 'getperson' url. Whoo hooo!

From what I've read, dynamic pages index slower, sometimes a lot.

Rush

One other interesting observation: When I first placed Adsense on my site the matching of the ad to the context of the page was abysmal. At first I had about the same set-up for the robots.txt file as I do now. Where I restrict the Google bot to only the search and getperson pages. I feared that my restrictiveness was causing much of my problems of bad context match. As a quick fix I changed the robots.txt file to allow access to all pages. Almost immediately the crawl rate of the Google bot went through the ceiling. It used up half of my host allowed bandwidth within a week. However, at that point I had 14,000 pages indexed when a site:winslowtree.com search was done and about 360 getperson pages when a inurl:winslowtree.com/tree/getperson.php was searched.

Because of the bandwidth being used and the success I had achieved in getting my pages indexed I put the more restrictive robots.txt file back in place. Now after the restrictive robots.txt file being in place for about three weeks, if those two searches are now done, 558 for the site:winslowtree.com and 70 inurl:winslowtree.com/tree/getperson.php. These numbers have been steadly dropping every day.

I'm not sure what to infer from this observation. Google has not stopped crawling my getperson pages. My showlog (and awstats) indicates several thousand of these pages per week are still being crawled. You would think once Google had a page indexed and that page is still active, they would leave it in their index. I understand that the pages that Google found when the robots.txt file was less restrictive might go away when their bot was later blocked from that page by the restrictive robots.txt file. But that has never occurred with the getperson pages and they continue to drop as well.

I would be interested in comments and speculation.

Steve

[arnold]

However, at that point I had 14,000 pages indexed when a site:winslowtree.com search was done and about 360 getperson pages when a inurl:winslowtree.com/tree/getperson.php was searched

I would be most appreciative if you were to select a random one hundred names (or whatever number you can live with) on your website and check to see if Google actually lists them in its database. It would be interesting to know what percentage of your website names actually appear in Google's database.

My experience with Google is abysmal. Thousands of Google hits per day since August, 2005, per TNG's showlog.php file, and a woeful number of actual links to our website.

[sjwinslow]

I would be most appreciative if you were to select a random one hundred names (or whatever number you can live with) on your website and check to see if Google actually lists them in its database. It would be interesting to know what percentage of your website names actually appear in Google's database.

My experience with Google is abysmal. Thousands of Google hits per day since August, 2005, per TNG's showlog.php file, and a woeful number of actual links to our website.

arnold,

I believe this is a case with a couple of links we can get you very exact numbers.

First the total number of individuals available for indexing on my site CLICK HERE [10,598 at post time]

Now the number of these individuals indexed by google CLICK HERE [72 at post time]

At the time of this post Google only displays .68% (that's about 7 out of every thousand) of the individuals on my site.

As I mentioned in my last post the 72 individuals that can be searched for and located on Google is much lower than it was even a couple of weeks ago. But it is now 2 higher than it was when I check this morning.

I feel Google does not like to index and display dynamic pages. Which I see as a big disadvantage that TNG brings with it. A year or so ago I only had about 6000 individuals and used the tools in Legacy Tree to build a genealogy site consisting of all html pages. Those pages were indexed and displayed within a month. In fact my current site consists of a number of html pages and they are all currently available for searching on Google.

The reason I believe this is a big problem with TNG is that a great many of us are going to the trouble of placing genealogy information on the web to allow others the advantage of viewing and using the information we have (I realize some people have their information blocked with passwords and are not interested in search engine access).

If I have 10,000 people available but only 72 of them can be found, I was better off when I had 6,000 where all of them could be found. Don't get me wrong, I could go on and on about the power and features of TNG, I LOVE THE SOFTWARE! But when I only get 1500 visitors per month and 95% of those came from non-search engine sources, I'm not achieving the attention or providing the service that I could with much simpler software.

I don't wish to ruffle peoples feathers, as I said I really do like the software. What I'm wondering is there is a way to stage TNG to make it more likable by the search engines. I'm not a software pro, but it seems that the blogs have solved this problem. They are dynamic page systems, running on php just like TNG, that the search engines love to index. What is it about them that makes them work? Is it the Perma-Links? If it is (and I expect this is the heart of the problem) can the links on TNG be made like Perma-Links?

I would happily pay for the next upgrade if we could get this search engine problem solved.

Steve

EDIT: Take a look at my next post for corrections to observations on Google indexing.

[sjwinslow]

Well after doing some looking around maybe it only looks like Google is never indexing a site. A close investigation looks like maybe Google is just SLOW to index a dynamic site.

I took a look at Darin's site and doing the same stats-- Here is the number of individuals he has on his site. CLICK HERE [14,300 at post time]

And the number of indexed pages on Google CLICK HERE [about 20,000 at post time]

Obviously, he has all the people in his database indexed and then some. Maybe we can get some posts as to how long it has taken some people to get their site fully indexed.

[arnold]

Steve,

Thank you for your detailed reply. I had my own concerns before we "moved" our website to TNG. I contacted Darrin and he stated that search engines would index our website after we began to use TNG.

Darrin addresses this issue at TNG Features as follows:

Still visible to search engines

Even though TNG pages are not created until requested, they can still be indexed by external search engines like Yahoo, Google, Excite, Lycos, etc., etc. That's because the finished pages are still just HTML, and the engines have to request the pages the same way you or I would. Just remember that it sometimes takes a while for the robots & crawlers to find your pages. Don't want them to find you? Just put the appropriate "no index, no follow" meta tag in your custom header.

Maybe Darrin will jump in and explain this in more detail.

[Rush]

Steve,

There is a way to do static html links with TNG... I've been messing around with it for about 3 weeks now.

My problem has been working the rewrite engine for TNG to convert the links generated by TNG (like mother / father name in a person's page) to the right static html page.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get that figured out, but as I have few minutes in a day I mess around with it.

Rush

[sjwinslow]

Steve,

There is a way to do static html links with TNG... I've been messing around with it for about 3 weeks now.

My problem has been working the rewrite engine for TNG to convert the links generated by TNG (like mother / father name in a person's page) to the right static html page.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get that figured out, but as I have few minutes in a day I mess around with it.

Rush

Rush,

If you get this to work, I'll be extremely interested. First and most importantly, I believe search engines will display our pages more quickly in their indexes. And second, the links themselves will have a little bit more meaning to the average person

(example

winslowtree.com/tree/winslow/pedigree/I1/

compared to 

winslowtree.com/tree/pedigree.php?personID=I1&tree=Winslow)

Truly, the best of luck with this project.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

April Adsense Enhancements

As I indicated in a number of posts back, I implemented 1 change to my site in the hope to enhance my Adsense click-throughs this month and I have the first weeks results. The change consisted of displaying ancestor pictures above the the Adsense footer ads on the home page and all of the TNG pages (my site has htlm pages as well as TNG pages). Earlier stats indicated that these pages were the worst on my site for click-through rates and was the reason I focused on them.

I believe the Home page stats were bad because currently this is the single most frequented page on my site (thereby the highest page impressions) and, to not detract for the content of the site, the ads in question (there is an ad link bar at the very top of the page and a small side bar on the left side, that were not change during this test) are being displayed at the bottom of the page, beyond what people see when the page is first displayed.

The TNG stats I believe were bad because people are clicking through ancestors and are focused on the first few top lines of information while seeking the person(s) of interest. This is somewhat supported in that my TNG pages have 2 ads per page, a very small ad link at the very top and a much larger banner ad in the footer. Before the recent addition of the photos, the very small ad at the top of the page received twice as many click-throughts as the much larger footer ad.

Now for the surprising results:

First I tried to compare results from the first 7 days of April to the last 7 days of March since the enhancement was added very late on Mar 31. I soon realized that the click rates in Mar were so low, in any one week, there was some group of pages that received no clicks at all. So I could get the comparison calculations to work I used the last 28 days of March and divided the numbers by 4.

The first week April page impressions for the Home page actually decreased by 18% from the March weekly average. However, clicks on the footer ad increased by 2700% (Yes, that number is correct) and earnings increased 688%

April page impressions for the TNG pages increased by 5% from the March average. The clicks on the footer ads increased by 780% with an earning increase of 528%. Note: Even though the top link ad is being clicked just as often as before the enhancement to the footer was made, the footer is now being clicked more than twice as often as the top link ad.

Making these changes to the Home page and the TNG pages increased overall site earnings by 11%

Adding the pictures above the footer ads has been by far the single largest improvement to the adsense results.

My next step will be to add pictures to a footer ad in the forum. The forum is also a very poor earnings producing location. However, I did not include it in this test because of problems with formatting.

Steve