Hey folks, it’s me! [whoopee goes the crowd]
With the office being so quiet (and dark and cold and wet and miserable and lonely) at the moment, what with everyone off sunnying themselves down under, I thought Id come back to my old (and somewhat neglected) blog and bring you up to speed with some goings on in the domaining world.
First up, is it general knowledge yet that two of the domain parking companies have been sold? I guess not so ill keep that one to myself for now.
Secondly, Id like to talk about being a Google Adsense publisher and what rules they now employ to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or, in more layman’s terms, who stays and who goes.
Google Adsense has always had it’s “publisher guidelines” and “TOS” which, if you spin about the various forums, numerous self appointed experts will tell you that your non-unique-content-free MFA site will inevitably get you banned. Using WhyPark.com’s (ahem) site building program will get you kicked out faster than republicans leaving the white house and top loading your site with banner ads is also something for which you will receive the dreaded “it has come to our attention that invalid clicks etc etc” banning email.
None of which is completely, scrub that, none of which is literally correct. Of course, blatant n00b’ish abuse of their banner distribution network is gonna get you kicked before pay day but there is also this huge grey area of what is acceptable and what isn’t. And has anyone gotten any clarification from google on the issue? Of course not. Here’s why!
Anyone familiar with the Yahoo panama discounting program will be aware that through their labyrinth of algorithms you are scored by domain and by account for the traffic you send to them. Your score (out of ten) also reflects the amount you get paid. For example, if you score a 6/10 for your traffic, you get 6/10ths of the click value. i.e. 60% of what you would have got if you were a ten. Quite simple really.
Now, without going into the actual scoring mechanism that determines this score and boring you to death with the minutia, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to fathom out that a click that converts for an advertiser scores a ten and a multiple click from an IP where only the header of the advertisers site is loaded scores a one. With numerous benchmarks between these two scenarios determining the other 8 possible scores.
Ok, so how does this relate to Google? Quite simply, the Yahoo panama project is a spin off from work carried out with/by/on behalf of Google. Back in the day when Google powered Yahoo’s generic search results and Applied Semantics together with domain parking was just a glint in Sergei and Larry’s eye, referral traffic was this simple. Believe it or not, not much has changed since then and this is the exact same methodology employed by Google today to measure their mass of web publishers. Forget top loading banners, MFA sites and unique content, Google simply append each publisher a score based on the traffic they send.
For the majority of publishers, If you score less than a certain number (be that 3 out of 10 lets say 
) you get the banning email. Simple as that!
Well, of course, its not as simple as that and other factors do matter. For example, there are the advertiser complaints about the quality of your traffic, disgruntled people upset by your use of banner ads – a swift click on the google logo on a banner allows a visitor to complain about you – and competitors/enemies click bombing your banners in order to facilitate a ban. All of which can and do get you banned as well.
The only tip i can possibly give to web publishers (or domainers dreaming of the day) is to keep records. Both proactively and re-actively. Use banner ads to supplement and compliment your content. Learn through some analytical plugin how and what your visitors are looking for and most of all keep and regularly look at your raw logs. If you see something untoward, deal with it. Google have a policy that any banned publisher who keeps and sends them raw logs of their traffic cant be all bad. J
How do you know that this is what Google is doing?
Just guessed…
Great post. A nice long one to make up for your weeks of neglect
You should share with your readers some of your more successful adsense websites. I love to look at sites that are successful as a learning experience and so I can copy ideas.
Loved the article and the comment.
Down Under is not that bright either these days.
enjoyed the read.
CHeers.
Because this domain used to be owned by Mr Cutts and this whole thing is a farce. Just waiting for the right time to go public with the history.
Ha… I think I got “bored to death by the minutia.” Great writing, as usual.
What is a top loading banner?
Hey Julia. Newbie-ish question for you.
I’ve got a couple sites hosted on servers of “non-unique-content-free MFA site” providers.
The sites have a few pages of unique content, and several (more than a few) pages of non-unique content. Monetized through affiliates, not Google Adsense.
In this type of situation, can you envision Google a) getting pissed and banning my sites from their index because there is non-unique content, or b) worse yet, banning from their index 100% of sites that are hosted on the providers of the “non-unique-content MFA site”? (throwing out the good with bad)
Thanks for your perspective.
Newb
@Newb – Im very well informed that the next G update will look to punish syndication sites. i.e. seek to remove them from their index. How they go about doing this will be interesting – because how do you completely establish which site holds the original article – but i guess thats a subject for another day.
With regard how my article reads, there seems to be some confusion as to what i was attempting to say. For clarity, I wasn’t saying MFA sites, including whypark, will get you kicked from Google – quite the contrary. The whole point to my post was to clarify that site layout/content/subject matter/banner dispersement is secondary to traffic that converts..
Hope that helps.. I do have a comment from Craig@whypark but it read all too much a PR release rather that a comment on the matter in hand – so i didnt print it..
Julia, when are you going to hit this lot with the mother lode? With reference to our long conversation on the night of 6th November in Victoria…
Feel free to pull only those comments out that you feel are applicable here from my comments. My point is that you can make a WhyPark site as original as a fully custom site. Our platform provides a ton of customization options and you don’t need to use AdSense.
Craig
Julia, you are wrong about this: “For example, if you score a 6/10 for your traffic, you get 6/10ths of the click value. i.e. 60% of what you would have got if you were a ten. Quite simple really.”
A 6/10 QS at Yahoo means that the advertiser might get a certain discount, which varies from keyword to keyword. In some cases, having a 4/10 QS would mean that you will be paid $0.45 per click instead of $0.50