A discussion of earning with Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers

Numerous articles have been written about Adsense publishers becoming victims of click-bombing and having their Adsense accounts revoked with loss of all earnings. Although the Google Adsense team are very decent about reinstating your Adsense account if you reported suspicious activity, the cold fact is that even if they reinstate your account, you will lose any earnings prior to your account being deactivated.

I personally went through the horrible process of having my Adsense account sabotaged last year. Although I did report the suspicious activity and removed the Adsense code from the site that was under attack, the Adsense support team never responded to my report of suspicious activity and two weeks later I received the dreaded email that my account had been banned by Adsense. I appealed the banning, fortunately I had kept records of the sabotage incedent and eventually my Adsense account was reinstated - MINUS all my earnings for two months. Remember, Adsense pays the *month after* you reach $100 and I was clearing $100 per month for years so I actually lost two months of earnings.

As a precaution, I have been checking out a number of solutions to prevent invalid clicks and one of the software solutions I’ve been considering purchasing is Adsense Click Lock.

Here’s some of the details from their sales page…

Maximum Adsense clicks You can select any number from 1 upwards. For each visitor to your site, this is the maximum number of Adsense ads that he or she can click on. Once a visitor has clicked on this number of ads, your Adsense ads are automatically hidden from that visitor. Maximum Page Views This feature provides a secondary protection mechanism and it is strongly recommended that you use it. You can select any number from 1 upwards, but a typical value is 3 to 5. For each visitor to your site, this is the maximum number of page views on which Adsense ads will be shown. If a visitor views more than this number of pages, your Adsense ads are automatically hidden from that visitor. Timed Adsense Ads Hiding You can have the ads hidden for an hour, 3 hours, 12 hours, a day, 3 days, 7 days, 15 days, 30 days or forever. The default is 3 days, which is generally more than adequate. This means that if a visitor returns to the site any time within 3 days of the ads being hidden, the ads will still be hidden. If they return to the site after 3 days, the ad click and page view counters will be reset - and Adsense ads will be visible again. Replacement Ads The software allows you to replace up to 8 Adsense ad blocks. To enter a replacement ad, select the number using the drop-down box, then type or paste the replacement ad into the large text box. To paste, right click inside the large text box and select “Paste” from the menu.

If anybody reading this article has had experience with this software and can offer an opinion about it’s usefulness, please leave a comment to this post because I’m certain there are many Adsense publishers out there who would find this solution very useful.

Happy Publishing,
Dave

Tags: Google, Adsense, Banned By Adsense

         

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Here’s a follow-up on my post yesterday about Google Adsense Section Targeting. I’ve been testing it out on one of my most active forums where I’ve been experiencing dificulty getting relevant targeted Adsense ads related to the thread or folder content. It seemed the majority of the Adsense ads showing inside threads and folders were irrelevant despite optimization of the dynamic page’s title, meta keywords and on-page keywords. Irrelevant ads mean less clicks which translates to less earnings for ads taking up valuable space.

The question of “how to most effectively target content sections for relevant ads”, I decided a good strategy would be to wrap the Adsense Section Targeting code around the most concise area of keywords for each page on my forum. That area would be the “linktree”, the area of the forum that looks like this…

Forums and blogs have a tendency get indexed more frequently than static sites because of the constantly changing content, so I figured the linktree would be the most logical area that would have the most relevant keywords I’d want to target. I wrapped that area with the Google code and I was suprised how quickly the changes took effect and how my forum threads and folders are now getting perfectly targeted ads. I have to hand it to the Google Adsense team on this modification and I believe will be a big plus for advertisers especially when their ads are being displayed on a dynamic content site.

         

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If you have a site with a lot of content, particularly a forum or messageboard where the content tends to change based on user interation, and you’ve been having trouble with Google Adsense showing appropriate related ads for your site, you will definitely want to learn about “Google Adsense Section Targeting”. From Google’s site:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting. To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting. The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format: <!– google_ad_section_start –> <!– google_ad_section_end –> You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag: <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –> With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following: <html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head> <body> <!– google_ad_section_start –> This is the text of your webpage. Most of your content resides here. <!– google_ad_section_end –> </body> </html> You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However, please be aware that we can’t guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you’ve made to your site.

I just found this information on DigitalPoint and I’ll be testing it out on a few of my forums to see if the targeting gets any better than it currently is. If it does work this could be a real blessing for those of us who have been seeing irrelevant Adsense ads that yield zero clicks.

         

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For those of you who didn’t receive the message today, Google has updated their Adsense referrals program for publishers. Here’s the email I received today…

Hello AdSense publisher, We are writing to share some important information with you about referrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts to optimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we are constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as well as tweaking those products already available to our publishers. In this spirit, we will be making some significant changes to referrals for the AdSense program in the coming weeks. As some of you may remember, in February 2007, as an experiment, we raised the bounty paid (from $100 to $250) when a publisher you refer brings in $100. We have decided to conclude this experiment and return to the original paid bounty amount of $100. In addition, we will no longer be offering the $5 bounty for the first $5 that a referred publisher brings in or the $2,000 bonus for referring 25 publishers earning $100 or more in any 180 day period. $100 will be the only bounty paid for referrals to the AdSense program. If you’re currently displaying referral units on your site directing users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for details about what to expect in the coming weeks. In early January, your AdSense account will be updated to only note the $100 payment for referring users to AdSense. You will continue to be paid under the current bounty structure ($5, $250, $2,000) until late January, after which you will receive $100 once a referred publisher brings in $100 within 180 days. Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. We apologize for any inconvenience this news may cause. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team

While these changes likely will not effect the average Google Adsense publisher, I’m sure some of the big guns like John Chow, Shoemoney and Problogger will feel the impact of these changes.

Here’s the link to the Google Adsense Blog post : Inside AdSense: Upcoming referrals changes

What I’m wondering is why Google has omitted a portion of blog post in the email I received today. It’s the blog post that has Adsense affiliates worldwide extremely agitated and it seems Google is attempting to mask this discontentment from their North American publishers. Here’s what was omitted from todays email that is not omitted on the Adsense Blog…

- If you’re outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan, AdSense referrals will be retired. For publishers not located in any of the three regions detailed above, we’ll soon be retiring referrals promoting AdSense. We’ve found that this referral product has not performed as well as we had hoped in these regions. Again, please keep in mind that you can still generate referrals for the other products listed under the ‘Referrals’ section of your AdSense Setup tab. Soon, you’ll no longer see the option to create a referral button for AdSense in your account, although existing buttons will display as normal. This specific referral type will then be retired during the last week of January - any users who meet the conversion criteria (reaching $100 in earnings within 180 days of sign-up and removing all payment holds) before the change will generate earnings of $250 for the referring publishers. Any conversions which occur after this change is made will not be recorded in your account. You may wish to begin replacing any existing referrals promoting AdSense with referrals for another product or an AdSense for content unit. We appreciate your support of this referral product, and hope it won’t cause you any inconvenience.

It seems Google has closed the Adsense referral program for any publishers outside of North America, Latin America and Japan. However, it seems that they didn’t find this portion of the announcement worthy of sending in today’s email to publishers located in the areas not effected by the closure of this portion of Adsense. Makes you wonder what Google’s hiding and why they would cut off a significant amount of publishers from their referral program.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be at all suprised if we start seeing a rise in the number of publishers banned from Adsense for “invalid clicks” like we did right before Google announced their 2007 Q3 earnings report which triggered a huge rise in their stock value. If you haven’t noticed, Google’s stock has been dropping like a ball of lead, down to 650 a share, almost 100 points from it’s highest mark of 747 in 2007. Rumour on the street has it that many bigtime brokers are shorting GOOG at 600 a share over the next month. Expect anything at this point, it seems Google is cutting corners hoping they can make some sort of announcement to get their stock shares back up over 700.

In the meantime, Peace to all my fellow publishers !!!
Dave

         

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