Adsense Image Placement Policy
Our friends at the Adsense Blog have clarified their official image-placement policy. Basically, don’t put images near ads which could distract your readers into clicking them. One must not “suggest a relationship” between your images, and Google’s ads. Clearly, they want to disassociate themselves with anything unsavory a webmaster might do to increase his or her click-through-rate (CTR).
So, here’s an example of “badsense:”
I’m not sure if any of my blogs use this technique; I’m in the middle of a redesign and I’ll make sure to stay as far away from it in the future as I can.
The Google Sandbox Effect Quantified
The Google Sandbox Effect, which is the phenomenon of a new and rising site suddenly being cut out of Google’s indices, is not a myth. It’s real, and can happen to your site.
If you look at the following graph, you’ll notice strong upward traffic trends until a certain arbitrary threshold was reached, the decision to sandbox my site made, and thereafter traffic (from Google) dropped off as the sandbox command propogated to all their search servers.
There seem to be three criteria for sandboxing at play here:
1) Your site must be above a certain traffic threshold to eliminate flagging tiny sites. I’m guessing that it’s about 10,000 hits over 7 days. If your site is not sustaining this kind of traffic, the sandbox algorithm won’t even consider it.
2) Your site must have a huge change in the number of documents on site. This site was a script which generated 1.17 million dynamic pages before it achieved popularity. I converted it to a blog with a few thousand pages, a reduction by a factor of -585. I suspect that this penalty applies to increases or decreases in the number of hosted pages.
3) Your site must be rising in popularity at a sufficiently high slope. There is no reason to penalize a site which grows slowly over years, because it cannot be a high-risk startup spam site.
If you want more good Google Sandbox analysis, there’s no better place to look than the SEOMox article 2005 Analysis of Google’s Sandbox. Even though it says “2005″ it’s not at all dated.
The Sketchier Side of This Domain
A commenter on Scoble’s post complained about four of my sites, calling them spammy and auto-generated. Ignoring some of off-context commentary on me as a person, Matt wrote:
I wouldn’t blame Scoble that much, Elliot’s [sic] homepage links to a number of really spammy looking things:
vioxx.elliottback.com/ (that’s the worst)
msn-icons.elliottback.com/main.php
credit-card-information.elliottback.com/
celebrity-photos.elliottback.com/
He seems to be trying to automate the creation of a ton of content pages, take advantage of WP’s natural search engine advantage, and then use the trust from his domain (from the software he writes) to cash in via the really obnoxious adsense everywhere. Google seems to have indexed almost a million pages on his site. Probably not the type of content that Google wants their ads next to, though.
To address these concerns, I am about to give a breakdown of all the subdomains and properties I own into four categories: Respectable Blogs, Niche Blogs, Online Tools, and Automatic Experiments. You might be surprised by the breakdown–most of the websites that I am toying with are not automated in any way.
Respectable Blogs
These are hand-written, original blogs on a variety of topics. While you might not consider gossip and celebrity photos to be interesting to you, our editors do their best to populate them with interesting commentary and posts:
- Asia Blog
- Books Blog
- Business School Blog
- Eric Back’s Blog
- Gadgets Blog
- Elliott Back dot COM
- Video Games
Niche Blogs
These are blogs which I write content for, not because I love them, but to earn revenue. They cover topics I find interesting enough to create original content and share ideas for, but they are not my way of expressing myself. In other words, these blogs are just business.
- COMS 482 Notes
- Cornell University Blog
- Gold’s Gym Sucks
- The Gossip Rag Blog
- Hot Celebrity Photos
- University Tours
Online Tools
Every now and then, I get a crazy idea. I want to try something out–like a new platform for photo sharing via Gallery 2 (the MSN Icons site) or how to parse credit card information (the CC site). So, I build a site, plaster it with ads when I’m done, and see what comes of it. These are just fun projects for me, toys to play with. No one visits them, and I hardly make revenue off them.
Automatic Experiments
I have three ongoing experiments into automation. The first is WP-Autoblog, which I am using to syndicate posts from search engines on Vioxx, essentially turning my site into a meta-search engine on that topic. I’m using attributed excerpts to avoid any legal or ethical issues. The second project is Eye My Spam, a blog that goes straight from email to blog post without any filtering. Since no one uses the email address for communication with me, that blog essentially posts spam from my inbox straight to the web, useful for archival and public information sharing purposes. Now you can google a piece of email and see yes, it is indeed spam. The third project is the unreleased Infinite Tree project, which I’m still working on. Basically, it’s just an aggregator based around keywords.
Conclusion
I help this hopes you readers sort out exactly what I do–harmless dabbling, some serious blogging, and some for-profit stuff. I’m not interested in blog automation research that hurts anyone. My policy on internet techniques is not to be jealous of some one else’s software or business model, provided it falls within the law, but rather to be open to changes in the way people view the web. Is a syndicator dangerous? Yes. Does it provide a paradigm shift when used correctly? Yes. That’s why I wrote WP-Autoblog–to give people control over content and sourcing. It can be abused, but it can also be used to create useful directories of links, or create a meta-blog of blogs you manage.