What are “Adsense Ghost Clicks”?

“Adsense Ghost Clicks” is how I call them, clicks that don’t earn anything. Did it ever happen to you that you login into your Adsense account showing a certain number of clicks and after refreshing the page you have some more clicks but the revenue is still the same as before? I made some research on this topic because this happened also to me more than once and I finally found the major reasons of Adsense Ghost Clicks.

1 ) When you added a new Adsense to your website, you forgot to unhook the “show public service announcements” option.

These kind of ads are also called PSA and are some sort of “free advertisements” to fill your ad space in case there are no paid ads available. Clicks on these ads are registered in your account but you are not paid for them. This is the first reason why you sometimes see your clicks increasing while your revenue remains the same.

2 ) You clicked on your own Ads.

Google Adsense has a very good tracking system and they know if you click on your own advertisements. Many webmasters think that Google won’t ban you anymore for clicking on your own ads but they will simply don’t count them. In fact the ufficial Google Adsense blog recently wrote:

We do understand that an accidental click may occur from time to time, so there’s no need to contact us each instance this occurs.

3 ) Invalid clicks.

If one of your visitors is clicking more than 1 advertisement, Google will probably consider those clicks invalid because they come from the same IP adress. Google will also consider them invalid if the clicks come from questionable sources (a bot made to click advertisements, for example).

4) Clicks from foreign countries.

Sometimes it happens that the language of the ad, differs from your website language. Google is using “Geo-targeting” but their system is not perfect. If you have an english page but a chinese ad will show up, clicks on this ad will be considered invalid clicks (this is only a theory yet).

5) Google does not charge the earnings at the same time as the clicks.

This is another theory I read about…it never happened to me but it seems like this could happen if you recieve a huge amount of daily clicks.

6) CPM advertisements.

These are advertisements that pay you for each impression and not for the clicks they recieve. Clicks will be counted in your Adsense account but your revenue will increase only by increasing the impressions and not by getting more clicks.

This sould be all reasons that bring “Ghost Clicks”. If know some more, drop me a comment and I will add them in this post (giving credit to who suggested them )

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20 Great Tips to get Banned from Google Adsense

Here is the ultimative guide on how you can get banned from the Google Adsense publisher program. Most of them will get you banned within a few days or maybe hours. Read the whole post, because tip number 20 is the most important one.

1 ) When you wake up, turn your pc on, open your website in the browser and start clicking on your own ads. The more ads you click, the better.

2 ) Write posts with a really big title where you ask your visitors to click on your Ads.

3 ) Make a video where you ask your visitors to click them.

4 ) If an Adsense block does not fit in your template, just modify the code.

5 ) Send out thousands of spam emails where you are asking to visit your website and to click on the ads

6 ) Hire some University students and tell them to click on your ads

7 ) Write a big post where you tell people about your Click Through Rate, your earnings per click and your impressions.

8 ) Partecipate in a click-ring (a group of people that click each others ads)

9 ) Use click-bots that will click automatically on your ads

10 ) Pay some Indian or Chinese clickers. There are really some people whose work is it to click on Adsense ads the whole day

11 ) Put a big “CLICK HERE” over your ads

12 ) Fill pages with ads and search boxes. You don’t need content, only ads.

13 ) Use pop-ups on your website

14 ) Register many different Adsense accounts and place ads from each account on the same page

15 ) Ignore emails you receive from Google Adsense

16 ) Put Adsense on pages with prohibited content (Warez, porn…)

17 ) Write Adsense support an email and tell them that you are cheating

18 ) Blend Adsense with ad relevant images

19 ) Display adsense on registration and “thank you” pages

20 ) Don’t follow any of the tips above or you will get banned for real . Immagine a “DO NOT” before each point.

12 ) Fill pages with ads and search boxes. You don’t need content, only ads.

13 ) Use pop-ups on your website

14 ) Register many different Adsense accounts and place ads from each account on the same page

15 ) Ignore emails you receive from Google Adsense

16 ) Put Adsense on pages with prohibited content (Warez, porn…)

17 ) Write Adsense support an email and tell them that you are cheating

18 ) Blend Adsense with ad relevant images

19 ) Display adsense on registration and “thank you” pages

20 ) Don’t follow any of the tips above or you will get banned for real . Immagine a “DO NOT” before each point.

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Big websites use Blended Adsense ads to maximize revenue

After a 25 day long research on Google Adsense I finally came to the result that blended Adsense ads don’t have the highest click through rate, but the highest revenue. These results can be considered valid for every website that has a 2 columns layout and displays ad in the upper right corner of it’s articles. But what about other types of websites? I’ve checked some of the big ones (all premium publishers that receive at least 20.000.000 pageviews or 5.000.000 search queries each month) to see what kind of Adsense techniques they are using:

• Blid.de - Bild is the biggest german daily newspaper - Blended Adsense
• Myspace - the biggest social networking site in the world - Blended Adsense
• Youtube - the biggest video hosting website - Blended Adsense
• NYTimes - New York Times newspaper - Blended Adsense
• Foodnetwork -Biggest food and recipes related website - Blended background but outstanding colors
• Business.com - Biggest business directory - Blended Adsense
• Howstuffworks - another big premium publisher - Blended Adsense
• About - huge news website - Blended Adsense

These are only a few examples but the results are quite clear: most of the big websites use blended Adsense advertisements because this is the best way maxime revenue. They have surely tried a lot of different techniques before they finally switched to blended ads. It would be interesting to find some really big websites using outstanding advertisement or Adsense ads with an image background.

For now, after the 25 day long research and after checking a lot of big Adsense premium publishers, it looks like Adsense is working best if the advertisements are blended with your website’s colors.

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Google Toolbar PageRank Losses For Hundreds of Websites

This morning brings news from around the web of losses to the Google Toolbar PageRank (the little green pixels displayed in the toolbar) for a myriad of sites. The best coverage I've seen comes from Andy Beard, as well as SEJournal and SELand (which has a comprehensive list of sites discussing the update).

I've gone through many of the threads and tried to pull together an accounting of websites that have been "reportedly" affected by the update. Hopefully, by collecting this data, and combining it with reports in the comments, we can have a relatively comprehensive view of the landscape and make educated guesses and hypotheses as to the root causes:

• www.autoblog.com PR6 > PR4
• www.forbes.com PR7 > PR5
• www.engadget.com PR7 > PR5
• www.problogger.net PR6 > PR4
• www.copyblogger.com PR6 > PR4
• www.joystiq.com PR6 > PR4
• www.tuaw.com PR6 > PR4
• www.searchengineguide.com PR7 > PR4
• www.seroundtable.com PR7 > PR4
• www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 > PR4
• www.johnchow.com PR6 > PR4
• www.quickonlinetips.com/PR6 > PR3
• weblogtoolscollection.com PR6 > PR4
• andybeard.eu PR5 > PR3
• www.volodymyrzablotskyy.com PR4 > PR2
• daily.stanford.edu PR9 > PR5
• www.thecrimson.com PR8 > PR4
• www.statcounter.com PR9 > PR6
  
• www.washingtonpost.com PR8 > PR5
  
• www.blogherald.com PR7 > PR4
• www.seopedia.org PR6 > PR5
• weblogtoolscollection.com PR6 > PR4
• www.masternewmedia.org PR7 > PR4
• www.sfgate.com PR7 > PR5
• www.suntimes.com PR7 > PR5
• www.seo-scoop.com PR6 > PR3
• spap-oop.blogspot.com PR5 > PR4
• Onemansblog.com PR8 > PR5
  

My personal opinion is that these losses are primarily a result of Google's continuing public relations campaign against paid linking. However, I'm certainly open to other interpretations.

Please do leave comments with any sites you know of that have been affected (or information about any of the sites I've listed above that may be inaccurate). Collective data is probably one of the best ways we can assess the situation.

Also - at SEOmoz, through our many tools, we have access to tens of thousands of toolbar PageRank scores for different domains. I've asked Jeff & Mel to run through those and request the new data as of today to attempt to identify the quantity of loss. We WILL NOT be exposing individual domains (unless they've already been outed elsewhere - as above), but we can provide an overall snapshot about raw percentages, etc. Jarrod Hunt noted in a comment here that he had seen a PageRank drop across the web, not just on sites selling links, and this should be a good way to verify whether our data matches his.

p.s. Please note that I'm not trying to "out" anyone for selling links. In fact, I believe there may be sites on that list that have never engaged in paid linking of any kind! I'm merely trying to document PageRank changes for collective study.

p.p.s. As Duncan Riley noted on Techcrunch, the AOL-owned Weblogs, Inc. blog network appears to have been affected, while Techcrunch's blog network and rival Gawker media have not.

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SEO Tips: 10 Useful Tips For Websites / Blogs

I’ve been using the free version of Web CEO this evening and even in the free version I’ve picked up a lot of useful tips to help with my Search Engine Optimisation. Here are 10 things that I’ve learnt so far:

1. Don’t use stop words like “and” “on” “a” “the” “about” “are” “that” “were” “by” “of” as search engines don’t take these auxillary words into consideration. By using a stop word in your Title tag, you potentially damage your rankings.
2. Keep the max number of words on a page under 1320. Analysis has shown that the top sites have no more than this per page. My page had 4495 words so I’m going back to posting just extracts on the homepage.
3. Put your keywords in bold as this tells the search engines these words are important.
4. Put your keywords in your titles as this tells the search engines these words are important.
5. Display your keywords at the end of the page. I’ve cheated here a bit and added a new nav at the bottom of all my pages that has my keywords as searches.
6. Use H1 tags for your titles as Search Engines pick these up. The blogware template doesn’t use these tags as standard so it took me a while to work out how to add them without my title font getting out of control, but I managed it.
7. Put your Keywords in your Alt image tags. Click here to learn why. All the images within my template now do this and I will try and add tags into any images I manually add from now on.
8. Keep your page size under 100Kb. Google only stores this as a maxiumum in its cache so any bigger and some of your content will get missed (Yahoo’s max is 500Kb)
9. Watch your colours. If your text is similar in colour to your backgrounds some search engine will consider this spam
10. Keyword Weight. Keywords must appear at in at least 1% of the words on the page.

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Essential Reading: SEO & Adsense Optimisation Tips From Google

Finally some SEO advice that can be validated. There are so many ‘experts’ on the subject of SEO that I’m never sure if changes I’ve made are having a positive or negative effect on my rankings.

Well, these tips are definitely bankers as they came out in an interview Matt Cutts, a senior Google engineer did with Performancing.

The tips he gave on how to optimise traffic are all very useful:

• Take the time to read Google’s webmaster guidelines
• Don’t bother with year/month/day in blog urls; Just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url
• Don’t try to rank for a huge phrase at first - pick a smaller niche and get to be known as an expert there, and then build your way out and up
• Controversial posts are sure to build links, but too many controversial posts may undermine your credibility.
• Commenting on other blogs isn’t that useful. There are a lot of ways to build a reputation, from having a great blog to producing a unique service to speaking at conferences.
• A single creative idea that catches fire in the blogosphere or digg.com is probably more useful than just chasing/buying/trading links.
• Original information or research is great bait to attract links

The additional tip I appreciated the most was the tip on how to improve Adsense targetting through Section targetting.

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like Google to emphasise or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content.

The HTML tags to emphasise a page section take the following format:

I’ve implemented these tags around the article section in my HTML so hopefully once my pages are re-indexed my targetting will improve, which should improve my CTR.

Thanks Matt!

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Guide To Meta Tag Search Engine Optimisation

A current thread in the forum made me kick myself this evening for forgetting one of the basic principles of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), using Meta Tags, and I’ve just spent 30 minutes getting my Meta Tags optimised for SEO. Below are the steps I took to Optimise my Meta Tags For Search Engines.

The Wordpress codex explains the value of Meta Tags very clearly:

As a search engine prowls your site, it gathers information from the title, headings, content, and Meta Tags such as description or keywords. It compares the words within each of these sections and “ranks” the site dependent upon how well the information matches.

I first had SEO optimisation explained to me back in 2000, and although some of the weightings have changed since then, the basic principles remain the same. The more times a given keyword appears (in the following order) in your site url, Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords then the higher your page score will be.

Based on this, it is clear that if your Meta Tags are optimised then this can help with search rankings. Tidying your Meta Tags will also help search engines present your results in a user friendly way, which will increase the changes that a user will click on your link rather than a competing link.

Step 1: Install Optimal Title Plugin To Optimise Meta Title Tag

The default structure for Titles within Wordpress displays the site name first, and then the post title. This is no good as a search engine will often truncate this so that it fits into their display format. If you have a long site name then all a user sees is your site title, rather than your article title which should more closely mirror what they are searching for, and increase your chances of being clicked.

To fix this install the Optimal Title Plugin which places the article title before the blog name in the page title, providing more meaningful search engine results (and also browser bookmark names).

Click here to install the plugin and for the installation instructions.

Step 2: Use The Excerpt_Reloaded Plugin To Optimise Meta Description Tag Length And Text

Why are Meta Description Tags Important?

The meta description tag describes your site’s content, giving search engines’ spiders an accurate summary filled with multiple keywords. The meta description tag is especially important because it’s the only tag supported by some engines. Another reason the meta description tag is important is that some engines use it as a site’s summary on their results pages. If they do, the reader may actually see this hidden tag.

I decided to use The Excerpt_Reloaded Plugin To Generate my Meta Description Tag, as I try to make sure that the first sentence on all of my posts reflects what the post is about, or at least contain a ‘hook’ to make readers read the whole post.

The general consensus is that a Meta Description should be under 200-250 characters so I created my Meta Description by adding the following code to my header (after the <>):

What this code does is add a 35 word excerpt if the page in question is a single page, removes all the HTML tags and adds a nice ‘more…’ at the end regardless of the length. I chose 35 words as this should keep me under 200 words, which is considered the maximum recommended length for the Meta Description. If the page being displayed is a multi-post view, then the blog name and description are displayed.

Download The Excerpt_Reloaded plugin here.
Step 3: Use The Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin To Create Meta Keywords

I got a lucky break here. I already use the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin to create tags for search engines like Technorati, as well to help users find related posts. Hidden away on the UTW options page was a option to use the tags I’d already created as Meta Keyword Tags. This was such a great result, as it means that all of my posts now have optimised Meta Keywords as I always add UTW tags whenever I write an article.
More: Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin

Optional Step 4: Add Other Meta Information

Although not essential, this can help some search engines and directories categorise your content. This site has a good list of tags that you can use and also this one on which tags to use. I decided to add the following:

I hope you found this guide useful. Please leave a comment if you have any questions or any other tips.

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