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Last week, I mentioned a client who lost her Google Adsense privileges and decided to use Adbrite. After a short week with Adbrite, I can tell you that she is ready to get back to Google ASAP. Adbrite did what it said it would - putting banner ads and text ads on her website that pay per 1000 impressions and per click.

However, they seem to have a limited number of advertisers and they cannot always put relevant ads on her website.

To give you an example, one of my clients’ websites is in the the category of “alternative health.” As of this moment, the ads that adbrite has on her website are 1) Personal Injury Attorney, 2) Buy Property Abroad, 3) Earn Income Now and 4) Massage. The last one, “massage” is potentially relevant, but the actual website to which it goes, is a shopping website that has nothing to do with massage nor alternative health. In short, Adbrite has put 4 ads on her site, none of which is contextually relevant to her content.

Most damning is the income. As a percentage, I would say that for every $100 that she would have earned with Google Adsense, she is earning $15 with Adbrite. That’s a huge decrease.

She is going to get ride of Adbrite, but not completely. One of her websites, a consumer-review of electronics products, seems to be getting a fair return on the Adbrite advertising, so she will keep the ads there.

Take home message? You do the math: Keep Google happy at all costs, and don’t do anything stupid or inadvertent that disables your adsense account! There is an upside if you are an advertiser - You may be able to get advertising at a much cheaper rate than you would get on Google.

I will keep looking for Google Adsense alternatives. Let me know if you see a network worth considering.

cheers - Ryan

Are you someone who sells products via a 1-page sales letter website? Or perhaps you are (more likely) someone who instantly clicks AWAY from a 1-page sales letter any time you see one?!

Ever wonder if Google penalizes 1-page sales websites?

Wonder no more: Google penalizes one-page landing pages.

I have a 1-page website that sells a back pain elimination product. I found out today that Google does not show it on ANY of it’s search engine results. It does not index the website at all.

Now, let’s be clear, you may look at the website, and say, “Yuck. I’m glad google doesn’t show me your crappy website, Ryan.” Fair enough. We can still be friends.

But I don’t think google has your best interests in mind when it dropped my site from its index. They are mainly looking after their own interests. I’ll tell you why in just a moment.

First, take a look at the website. It used to get a substantial amount of free traffic from google: Ryan’s U-G-L-Y Sales Letter:xbackpain.com. It is one my earliest and most primitive sales pages, and yes, it’s in serious need of an upgrade

But why does google no longer index the website?

Would google not index it, simply because it is not pretty? I don’t think so.

Does Google consider it a spam website? Again, I don’t think so. It has been up for over a year, and it has plenty of content and incoming links from other websites and articles.

However, Google prides itself on being a search engine that focuses on user-experience and websites that have high informational value. Thus, Wikipedia, University websites and websites with a great deal of content tend to get higher rankings. But that would be a reason to give my site a lower ranking not drop it from the rankings altogether.

So why does the website not appear in Google’s rankings?

The website is designed to sell a product and google feels that I should PAY for the privilege of getting traffic. By not-indexing my website, I am forced to use Google’s Pay-Per-Click system if I want them to send me traffic.

However, all is not lost and there are some ways to get re-indexed. (And some ways to avoid getting banned from the search results in the first place). Here are a couple of things that I will do and that you may want to consider, if you have a 1-page sales letter website:

1. Add some outgoing links to websites owned by other people and related to the topic.

2. Add some additonal informational pages about the website’s topic.

3. Add a blog about the topic.

4. Add a forum.

All of these options will should only take an hour or so to add - keeping you in the index, and in my case (I hope) adding me back in!

While looking through my google adsense and analytics results last month I made passing notice that one of my niche websites (a blog) had a clickthrough ratio that was over 7%. Meaning that for every 100 people who visited my site at least 7 clicked on a google adsense ad. That’s a damn high click-through ratio.

But just a few minutes ago, I looked at the stats again. So far this month, the site has a click through ratio of over 12%. I am somewhat stunned. I am used to my sites only having a 1 - 4% click-through rate.

Why has the click-through rate increased so dramatically?

The website has not changed in many months. I have not re-designed it nor changed the ad-formatting. Neither is it getting more traffic. So why the increase in clicks?

Looking at which specific posts are getting the traffic and clicks, I realized that the clicks are coming from a “sub-topic” within the niche. The niche is about a specific resort town in the intermountain west. Recently the town added a concert hall and I began writing about the venue and the artists visiting it. When people search for the concert venue on google (and yahoo and other search engines) they end up finding my website before they find the website about the concert hall. And the concert hall uses google adsense to place ads on my website. The ads are highly-targeted and highly relevant to what the people are looking for so they click the ads.

There is another factor to consider. My content on the blog gives people important information about the concert hall, but it does not give them everything that they need to know. They can find out about the concert hall, who is playing there, and when, but if they want to buy tickets, they have to click on the google ad that will take them to the concert hall website to buy tickets. I believe that is what accounts for the high clickthrough rate.

I didn’t intend it to turn out that way, it just did. Now, I am wondering if I have found a way to increase google clicks for a variety of topics.