Google Adsense Experiences

[sjwinslow]

Well I changed my mind about adding the pictures to the ads on the Forum pages. The ad targeting on the forum pages is not very good. I may just remove the ads all together from those pages. If Google hasn't figured out what those pages are about in over a month and a half I'm not optimistic it ever will.

However, I did decide to add the pictures to the remainder of my html pages. These page have typically had the best click-through rates in the past. We'll see if there are any improvements.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

On 4/16 I sent out a newsletter via e-mail to about 400 individuals who have contacted me through my website within the last year. Prior to sending out the newsletter, Google Analytics had been set up on my website and parameters included in the e-mail newsletter that supported tracking results of the mailing. Google Analytics were also set up to monitor the Adsense clicks as a tracking goal on the site.

After a full day following the newsletter distribution about 25% of the recipients have visited my web site using the links included in the newsletter. The number of visitors was significant immediately following the distribution. Only a minor trickling of visitors from the newsletter is occurring after one day later. These visitors initiated about 1000 page views on my site. This is about four times my normal one-day activity in terms of page views and about five times the normal amount of Adsense revenue was obtained.

This was my first time to use the combination of Google Adsense and Google Analytics. Together they make a very good tool for tracking what newsletter subjects were most interesting to the readers and which readers were most likely to click on an Adsense links.

One of the biggest revelations of this exercise came from a couple of the items in the newsletter that were teasers for articles I had recently written for other publications. The reprints of these articles were included in the Forum on my web site. This turned out to be one of the most visited areas. However, it was one of the few areas where people visited and then left the web site without viewing other pages on the site. The total bounce rate for the forum topics was 46%, more than twice as much as any other entrance point with more than two visits. It is obvious that these were topics of interest since these topics were viewed 153 times for an average of 2:13 minutes.

Even though the Forum is an easy place for me to publish news, research results and points of interest, it is obvious that the Forum is also an easy place to loose visitors. I believe that it was easy for newsletter recipients to click on a link from within the newsletter that pointed them to the Forum. But once there and they completed reading the article, they either got lost or they were given no reason to continue viewing the site.

[Xau]

I did try the advertisements, but just like you no one clicks on things, think about how many times you have Intentionally clicked on someones ads? if your like me very rarely unless its taking me some where i was already planning on going.

you might make 30 cents for the 1 click.

but how much do you spend to advertise your site now? you have to have it everywhere.

Logs - now if i want to do statistics for my site. I use webalizer to see overall how my site is doing.

i dont worry that they goto this page or that. if i was i would download the Raw Logs and use software like Webtrends to Truely Analyze the data in a million different ways.

The question i pose to you are you better off with the ads or the 2nd option i have seen is just flat out ask for donations to support this site.

So do you expect your revenue generated from the site to pay 100% of the costs associated with it?

[sjwinslow]

Xau,

I guess my experience has been a little better than you seemed to have had. Don't get me wrong, I'm not giving up my day job but I started with Adsense in February and have already earned back a 1/2 years worth of hosting and domain costs. That's not a lot of money but this was first an experiment and second a way of earning back some of my operating cost.

When I started this experiment, my goal was to try to earn back a years worth of operating cost over the period of one year. These costs were to include hosting, domain costs and software upgrades (domain @$15/yr, hosting@$5/mo & a $30 TNG upgrade; not my labor, this is my hobby after all). I do not buy Adwords or pay for other ways to advertise my site. The earnings ramp up tracked my learning curve. I had never done any type of ad placement or promotion on my site before (I do have an area for donations; after 1 year of having a donations page $0 revenue).

I first started placing ads in mid-February and the earnings for the last 2-weeks of that month was dismal (<$1). To give Adsense a fair shake I did a little reading and learned from others on the web on what worked and what didn't. These changes were in place to be able to compare the last 2-weeks of March with the last 2-weeks of Feb. Revenue increased 2637%. It was amazing what a little ad placement optimization and ad targeting can do to improve earnings. April's increase is also significant, although understandably not as astonishing (only 530% increase for the first 2-weeks of April compared to the first 2-weeks of March). Until Google starts including more of my TNG pages in their index, I expect future months to be comparable to April.

I typically do a newsletter about quarterly since I coordinate a DNA project for our surname. This time I wanted to see how well the newsletter was received. This newsletter was structure to be a list of short teasers with links back to the main site to read the full story or view enhanced site features. Google Analytics allows me to track how many people opened the newsletter, what links they were interested it, how many and which pages they viewed and how many clicked on ads.

I found that only about 1/4 of the people mailed visited my site (this tells me I need to do a lot of work on my newsletter before I send out the next one) I also found that people were a lot more interested in news articles than site enhancements. This may seem obvious after the fact but I sure didn't know it before hand and didn't know the degree that people were hungry for news. I also found that people got lost in my Forum. When people visited other pages they would click on other links after reading the story, but in the Forum they exited the site (not by clicking an ad) once done with the story.

All of this has given me invaluable information on how to improve the content and navigation on my site to improve the visitor's experience. Additionally, I now have very good information on where newsletter readers interest lie. The earnings from ads have been more than I expected but the information gained was far more valuable than the few dollars received in ad earnings. A lot of this information could be obtained from site logs (I use them as well) but I have never had such a clear picture of what is working and what is not from just using logs.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

The reason for the long delay in postings is I have been trying to find out why Google dropped so many pages from my site. I don't believe this had anything to do with Adsense but Adsense revenues were affected by the drop in traffic to my site.

It seems as though Google has implemented new software, "Big Daddy", that performs the indexing for all the Google servers. The new Big Daddy has the most negative effect on sites placed in service since June of 2005. It seems to have several and much more complicated criteria for including pages from sites. The most predominate criteria looks to be age of domain, inbound links and duplicate content.

Since my site was put in service in Feb. of this year, I seem to have been hit hard by all these criteria. Only recently, have I found something that seems to help the situation. I observed that a site that was relative new and had few inbound links would not be indexed completely at all levels. The older the site and the more relevant inbound links caused Google to index deeper. Note: This is not saying that my site was not being crawled deeply by Google, but rather those crawls were not producing additions to the indexes.

Adding surnames to the home page and creating a new set of pages at the second level has significantly increased the traffic to my site. Adsense revenues are still not as good as I had projected for this time-frame but at least they are back on the rise again.

Steve

[Rush]

Thanks for the update Steve...

I did some 'Big Daddy' reading and it seems to match up pretty well to what has been happening. My old links still remaining in the index (though they haven't been in around for close to a year), the dropping of my recently indexed pages and the refusal to re-index any pages. Yahoo and MSN have index them fine, but they are slow to spider a site.

Though I really don't want a home page that is a mile long, I will probably try to implement something similar to what you did. I'm really curious to see how that one turns out.

Rush

[sjwinslow]

Rush,

I understand your reluctance to add all your surnames to your home page. I gave it a lot of consideration before I did it. The final deciding factor for me was that if it didn't work, I was going to move the surnames to my site map that is located on a second level and keep the new page (find.php) that I created to display all the peoples names on my site. This alternate setup would keep all the current pages and only change the structure a little.

However, placing the surnames on the home page has had more benefits than I first anticipated and I don't plan to change it. I did achieve a pretty good listing in Google. Real (not supplemental) pages indexed increased from 150 to almost 1000 of which 783 are the new find.php pages that posts name, birth date/location and spouse in the search engine index for people to find my site by.

But the unanticipated benefit was for the alternate search engines. I was receiving almost no traffic from Yahoo or MSN before the change. Since both of these have only a few of my pages indexed and lower overall search traffic I was never expecting much traffic from them. However, after making the change to the home page (even the smaller search engines have my home page indexed) I am now receiving more traffic from Yahoo and MSN together than from Google.

I've also seen a reduction of page bounces on my home page since I placed the surnames there. It seems people who land there now have more options to click on something of interest to them and they stay longer.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

Here are some real numbers comparing May 17-23 and May 24-30 (May 24 is the first day after I added the surnames to my home page) Keep in mind that both Yahoo and MSN did not pick up the changes until a couple of days after the change was made, but these are the best comparisons I have.

____________5/17-5/23____5/24-5/30__Change

Total Visits______125_________229_____+83%

Google Ref_______36__________74____+105%

Yahoo Ref________11__________36____+227%

MSN Ref__________0___________26____(Increase is infinite)

Home Pg Bounce__28%_________21%__-25%

Total Bounce_____32%_________29%___-9%

[Rush]

[qoute]Here are some real numbers comparing May 17-23 and May 24-30...

I don't think I can argue those numbers (not that I would want to )

As of tonight, I'm implementing something similar to what you did. I'll have to keep a close eye and see if there are any improvements. One getperson.php page would be an improvement over the zero I have indexed now.

Rush

[sjwinslow]

Here are the most recent numbers. I really would like someone else to try this approach to make sure it's not a coincidence that my numbers are increasing so significantly. The total number of pages indexed in Google have gone from about 150 to 16400 and the new find.php pages indexed have gone from nothing to 15400, while only a minor increase in getperson pages from 9 to 40. But remember the new find.php page contains all the vital information on an individual that would allow someone to locate a desired person using a search engine.

Date____Total pgs_getperson__find

23-May_____151_____9

24-May_____154_____9

25-May_____874_____9_______663

26-May_____924_____7_______783

30-May_____955____14_______785

31-May___10500____14_______991

1-Jun_____13800____14______1000

2-Jun_____16400____40_____15400

Steve

[thewag]

How heavily modified is your find.php? Could you post it?

Ben

[steve30000]

I'll be curious to see how this trends in the long run. I know I went through that point of a large ramp up of listed pages when I first used a sitemap. Then after a few weeks, it started dropping down again as google deemed me unworthy.

[sjwinslow]

thewag,

The modifications are relatively small (they had to be, since I know almost nothing about php code) but unfortunately the changes are rather scattered throughout the file. The primary changes were to get rid of extraneous information and focus on the meat of name, birth date, birth place and spouse. I also overrode the default of 50 rows per page (this can be done with the admin controls but I only wanted to expand the rows per page on this one page). I wanted to keep the navigation structure as flat as possible so I allowed 600 rows per page. This got all but one of my surnames down to one page. There is one other modification that returns a title, meta-title and meta-description of [search Results for "$surname"]. This works for this page modification because I'm only using it to display by surname. Note: If your are going to use the attached file be sure and change the hard-coded $find_url to point to your site. I had to hard code this since I didn't want to make major modification to TNG. Remember these changes will only work if you feed the find.php the right url string. e.g.,

http://www.winslowtree.com/tree/find.php?mylastname=WINSLOW&lnqualify=equals&mybool=AND&showspouse=yes

Steve30000,

I understand your concern that this could be a temporary trend, I have it as well. My site's domain was registered in Jan. of this year, by mid Feb. I had about 14,000 pages listed in Google. March was the first month I stated to see a drop in pages and that continued until the 23rd of May when I was down to about 150 pages total. During March, April and May I continually looked for things that might be wrong with my site that could be the cause. Minor tweaks and enhancements were made during that time but nothing stemmed the loss of pages.

Most of the search engine forums are still hot with talk about web sites loosing thousands of pages with the induction of Google's "Big Daddy" release that started the first part of this year. I have found no one that claims to have a foolproof way to get your site indexed and keep it indexed. I know there are several people on this board that are having problems with Google indexing their pages and I wanted to pass along the only thing I've turned up that has made a dent in this problem (even though it might only be temporary). Anyone doing this should know that Google recommends only 100 links per page and this approach exceeds that number significantly. This may make your site vulnerable to chances to the search engines in the future.

I just couldn't stand to set by month after month waiting for something to happen. (a personal flaw )

Steve

find.php

[sjwinslow]

Ben, Steve & Rush,

I noticed that all of you are listed by Google as having no inbound links that Google acknowledges even though Yahoo indicates you have several. It might be more beneficial to try to determine why your inbound links are not being considered as valid by Google before trying other things. With no inbound links, there is no Page Rank and the belief is now with Big Daddy, that very few pages will be indexed regardless of the navigation.

My site has only 16 links that are acknowledged by Google even though Yahoo indicates over 100. There could be several reasons your links are not being acknowledged.

Steve

[Rush]

Steve,

Currently I'm showing this for inbound links:

Engine Count

Google 9

Yahoo 0

MSN 85

and a PR3 for my home page.

I have quite a few other inbound links that do not appear with Google and all the Google datacenters reflect the same 9 links. Of course, the PR of inbound links is a weighing factor also. Why do other sites that have a PR6 linking to me don't appear as an inbound link Hard to answer that one, at least for me.

Rush

[thewag]

Ben, Steve & Rush,

I noticed that all of you are listed by Google as having no inbound links that Google acknowledges even though Yahoo indicates you have several. It might be more beneficial to try to determine why your inbound links are not being considered as valid by Google before trying other things. With no inbound links, there is no Page Rank and the belief is now with Big Daddy, that very few pages will be indexed regardless of the navigation.

What the heck is an inbound link?

I'm getting annoyed with google. It seems now all my sites (other non-TNG ones) are zilch.....

[sjwinslow]

What the heck is an inbound link?

I'm getting annoyed with google. It seems now all my sites (other non-TNG ones) are zilch.....

Ben,

You can check the number of sites that link to your site by keying in you domain name at this site: http://www.seologs.com/link-popularity-tool.html You'll see your site has several links acknowledged by Yahoo and others but non by Google. It is believed that Google uses the number of inbound links to a site as a major component of determining Page Rank. Additionally, since the new Big Daddy release has been put in place since the first of the year, it is also believed that a higher Page Rank (along with other things) is needed to get pages deeper (or more clicks away from the home page) to be indexed.

Because of this theory is the reason I placed the surnames on my home page and created the find.php page to display all the people on my site only 1 click away from the home page.

Steve

P.S. This morning Google is showing on all of its data-centers that I now have between 16,200 and 22,300 pages indexed. That is as many as 150 times as many pages as just a week ago and the average weekly traffic has tripled on my site.

[rdmorss]

...and the average weekly traffic has tripled on my site.

How much of that additional traffic is just googlebot?

[arnold]

Robert has a very good point.

Darrin's log page keeps track of all hits to your website. The hits you see in this log soon become meaningless as more and more and more robots visit, revisit, rerevisit, etc., your website.

To obtain "cleaner" numbers from Darrin's log, go to Administration / Setup & Configuration / Log Settings and look for Exclude Host Names. This is what I have entered there: googlebot.com, proxy.aol.com, gigablast.com.

[sjwinslow]

How much of that additional traffic is just googlebot?

None. I use Google analytics to track traffic. When I mentioned traffic I should have been more specific in that I was referencing unique visits. There is no way I could use the TNG log for tracking meaningful traffic as Google crawls my site many times at a rate of over 200 page accesses in 20 minutes (over 140,000 pages per month per awstats).

It is obviously it is a real traffic increase, as it shows up in several places, Google Analytics unique visits, Google Adsense page views and in the clicks recorded on Adsense ads (awstats is not as good at filtering bot accesses but there is a significant increase there as well).

The real question is, will the new pages stay indexed? Check out the post here and see how much Darrin's site has dropped since the time (April 7) of the original post http://www.tngforum.us/index.php?s=&showto...findpost&p=4026 I originally thought that older sites would not be affected by the new Google algo.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

Since we just finished the month of June I though I'd do a quick update on my progress with Adsense.

First, let me cover some of the activities that occurred in June. The primary change was the addition of the Surnames contained in my site on the homepage and the new find.php summary pages. As mentioned above this significantly increased the traffic to my site during June. Google indexed all of the find.php pages initially within about a week and this provided people a means to locate all of the individuals on my site using Google's search engine. Additionally, since both Yahoo and MSN have few of my pages indexed but both have the homepage, significant traffic increases were seen from those sources from people looking for specific surnames.

Overall, the traffic to the site doubled between May and June. May produced 800 unique visitors that viewed 6,944 pages. June produced 1,599 unique visitors that viewed 14,309 pages. (Note: these numbers are from Google Analytics that shows real visitors and not bot traffic)

From an Adsense view the May visitors clicked ads to produce a revenue of $13.68 and the June visitors clicked ads for a revenue of $36.40. That equates to a 92.9% increase in clicks and a 166% increase in revenue. (Note: because of the Adsense TOS I can not publish additional Adsense statistics)

[arnold]

What am I missing? You have 10,600 individuals in your database. Google shows you with 19,300 web pages.

I use find.php for only three surnames as a test. There are 21,000 Spragues in our database of whom 16,000 are deceased and thus will appear with a given name and a surname of Sprague. Of this 16,000 individuals, Google only shows 873 web pages.

Below is the code from our maiin page.

<a href="genealogy/find.php?mylastname=DIBBLEE&amp;lnqualify=equals&amp;mybool=AND&amp;showspouse=yes">DIBBLEE</a>

<a href="genealogy/find.php?mylastname=SPRAGUE&amp;lnqualify=equals&amp;mybool=AND&amp;showspouse=yes">SPRAGUE</a>

<a href="genealogy/find.php?mylastname=WEBER&amp;lnqualify=equals&amp;mybool=AND&amp;showspouse=yes">WEBER</a><br>

<a href="http://tngnetwork.lythgoes.net/gdxsearch.php?surname=dibblee&amp;ssearchtype=starts" rel="external" title="Dibblee GENDEX search">Dibblee</a>

<a href="http://tngnetwork.lythgoes.net/gdxsearch.php?surname=sprague&amp;ssearchtype=starts" rel="external" title="Sprague GENDEX search">Sprague</a>

<a href="http://tngnetwork.lythgoes.net/gdxsearch.php?surname=weber&amp;ssearchtype=starts" rel="external" title="Weber GENDEX search">Weber</a>

This code has been in place for several weeks, maybe even a month.

[sjwinslow]

arnold,

I'm sure there are other things that may effect how your site is indexed but here are a couple of my quick observations.

1. Actually you have many more pages indexed than you think. Try this link Click Here

2. I couldn't find a robots.txt file for your site. I have mine set to focus the bots to the specific pages I want indexed. TNG contains 1,000s of what I call "trash pages" in terms of the search engines. The only pages I allow the bot to index on TNG is the find.php pages and the getperson.php pages. To get a 100,000 pages indexed in Google I hear estimates as high as a page rank of 7 would be needed. In your case, if I had as many pages to index as you, I would also block the getperson.php pages and rely on the the find.php pages for people being able to locate individuals on my site.

3. Most likely your tngrobots.php file also needs to be updated so that the meta tags for the Noindex and Nofollow commands match the new more restrictive robots.txt file.

4. Many of your pages that are indexed contain PHPSESSID appended to the URL. There are instructions on this forum on how to keep these from being indexed. The reason you don't want these indexed is that a new session ID is assigned each time a bot crawls your site. The bot sees the new session ID in the URL and thinks this is a different URL that points to the same material. You then receive a duplicate penalty and your pages are unlisted.

5. You need to implement the modification that prevents a duplicate print page being indexed. See the forum posting Here

6. If you don't have a sitemap.xml submitted to Google, its a good idea to do it.

7. When I ran the html Markup Validation on your homepage it found 24 errors. You may want to look into fixing these so the bots will crawl you pages correctly.

These are only a few of the things I did to help the search engines index my site better. None are guaranteed to get your site indexed but they just might help.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

The Adsense and general traffic for the month of July was a little disappointing. Several things contributed to the drop in traffic including, general drop due to summer, no newsletter was published, a loss of indexed find.php pages and several getperson.php pages going supplemental.

June 26 was a significant date for the way Google listed pages for the site. Prior to the 6/26 the listings showed 29,400 overall pages, 379 getperson (non-supplemental pages) and 21,500 find.php pages. After 6/26 there were 19,300 overall pages, 7 getperson (non-supplemental pages) and 189 find.php pages. The number of pages continued to drop in each category throughout the month of July. It wasn't until July 27 that the number of find.php pages started to climb again from a low of 0 pages indexed. It does seem that on June 26, a large number of pages (and almost all of the getperson.php pages) were moved to supplemental status.

However, overall traffic to the site was not affected as badly as might be expected with the large loss of pages from the index. July saw 1,223 unique visitors compared to June's 1,599 for a 23% drop in visitors. Adsense revenue dropped from June's $36.40 to July's $29.50 for a 19% drop.

The outlook for August is a little more optimistic since the number of find.php pages are now back above 500 and enough new content has been add to the site to justify a newsletter. A newsletter typically brings about 400 visitors to the site, but most don't click ads.

Efforts to get the getperson pages out of supplemental have not been successful to date. Two primary changes may have a positive effect later. These were including the noindex/nofollow on the duplicate print page and doing a 301 redirect on about 7,500 similar getperson pages that are still in Google's index from an older site. I still think the number of duplicate labels and the spouse getperson pages provide too much similarity to get these pages back in the primary index.

[sjwinslow]

Adsense for August was about the same as July and considering the changes in Google's listing and rebuilding the site, I'm quite happy with that.

Google decided to completely remove all of the find.php pages for my site from their index soon after the beginning of Aug. At about the same time Yahoo add significant numbers of find.php pages. Currently about 900 total pages are listed on Yahoo and about 750 of them are find.php pages. That's about half of the total find pages available for indexing. Google now has about 32,000 total pages (all but about 100 are supplemental) listed, 0 find.php pages and about 14,000 getperson.php supplemental pages. Google is still supplying the most visitors (about 38% & Yahoo 20% for Aug)

The changes made to the site were to restrict bot access to any possible duplicate content and change from a table structure to CSS for all of the html pages. Additions to the site included the heraldry section and the TNG Site Reviews.

Unique visitors increased to 1,390 from July's 1,223 and revenue to $31.00 from July's $29.50.

Steve