The Great Google Adsense Side Effect

By Rich Ord 

The Internet is now built for Adsense

If the Internet consisted of real brick and mortar buildings there would be a construction boom going on right now like the world has never seen. The Internet is not in a recession or on the road to a depression, rather it is experiencing an economic and social explosion of activity.

The reason ... Google Adsense.

Most people think of Google Adsense as being a game-changer for advertising, but what Google Adsense has also done is to create a huge incentive to build sites around topics to place Google Adwords on. Where this seems to work best is with gadgets. There is no topic left untouched by the Adsense content builders, but gadgets are at the heart of this new Internet construction boom. 

The Gadget Content Explosion...

On November 5th, 2007 Google announced the name of its Google phone project ...Android.

Name announcements are where it all starts because domaining is at the heart of SEO which is important to getting free traffic which is critical to new Internet projects getting Adsense funding. Literally, hundreds of domains have been registered since this announcement with the Android name and other variations that mean the same. 

A few examples ....

helloandroid.com 
justanotherandroidblog.com
phandroid.com

All of those domains now rank in the top ten results when searching for "android blog" in Google!

Trademark Infringement? Nope! 

A more schooled business person might wonder about all of this trademark infringement and think cease and desist letters will be flying to all of these new sites. Think again my old school friend! The legal community may not be aware, but trademarking is no longer enforced by a large army of corporations on the Internet. The reason is because companies have finally figured out that Internet content centered around their brands is rather GOOD for their brands! 

The majority of the content I am talking about is of the good kind where these newly constructed websites become the hub for discussion, commenting, reviewing, supporting and in general getting down to the nitty-gritty of every new gadget (or every new anything) introduced to the world.  Google and the other search engines then crawl this content and in effect help turn these new web construction sites into thriving neighborhood hangouts where thousands of real people actually go. 

These people become the first drivers of new products and are the early adopters who will wait in line to buy. An example of this is the recently launched Blackberry Storm available for Verizon customers. Lines were out the door at Verizon stores and most locations sold out. The word of mouth on this product spawned from thousands of websites, many of which were created to focus exclusively on the Blackberry Storm. 

Search Google for "blackberry storm forum" (without quotations) and you will see these sites in the top listings:

blackberrystormforum.com
everythingberry.com
storm-blackberry.com (with Yahoo ads)

These sites were produced to build a community that clicks Adwords ads. They were created because of the Adsense program, but they still do serve a greater good in my opinion, which is to be an independent source of information and Q&A. 

The two most common types of sites created for Adsense are blogs and forums. Others include software downloads, niche directories and news headline type sites. Over time, domains with the product name followed by generic words that are typically searched for such as ...  forum, forums, blog, video and news tend to rise to the top of search results. Website builders around the world know this and build accordingly. 

Is the content of bad quality? 

Yes and no. There are of course many spammy scraper sites that steal content from others and then automatically update the sites. However, those are not the ones usually showing up in the top search results. The site winning the search result wars for "android blog", for instance, isgoogleandroidblog. blogspot.com which is the number one result. The site appears to be a real hub for Google Android content and reader comments and also contains a column of Google Adwords ads! 

Search for any popular gadget and you will see quality blogs, forums and news sites in top results that were created to cash in from Google Asense:

>> "Amazon Kindle blog" - amazonkindleblog.com
>> "iPhone news" - iphonestalk.com, iphonealley.com, iphone-ipod.org
>> "Wii blog" - wiiblog.net, wiispin.com (both created for Adsense)

The How-To...

1. Follow the announcements on the tech news gadget sites and grab domains as soon as names are announced.

2. Build a blog or forum ASAP on the topic. It is important to build first so that Google crawls you first.

3. Create quality content written by you or experts (your friends :). It is important to not plagorize other content on the Internet. Be distinct with your voice by using humor or technical savvyness. Do not use paid writers that write $20 articles unless you know they write quality. Quality is king, even when building for Adsense!

4. Participate in related forums and comment on blogs and news articles that relate to your topic. Be real though, do not be a comment spammer. This will get your site linked so that Google crawls it.

5. Update your site a couple times a day and make your content unique.

How the Ads Get On Your Site??

Once you join the AdSense program – and Google approves your site or sites, which we’ll cover in detail shortly – the actual process of displaying ads on your website is extremely simple. You are provided with a small HTML script, which you can paste anywhere on your webpage. You may paste this code any number of times and on multiple pages, and watch the ads get served! Google automatically places AdWords ads that are most relevant, from its extensive advertiser base. Google employs various sophisticated algorithms to determine the relevancy of the ads to your content.

Before we get into how Google assesses sites, and whether a few or many placements of that magic script will deliver optimum results, let’s review the advantages of AdSense.

Google AdSense is simple to use and manage. Once approved, displaying ads on your webpage does not take time and requires minimal technical knowledge.

Google AdSense is very smart about ad selection. The ads that are displayed are only those that are relevant to your content, and Google has strict quality control on the general quality of the ads.

Google AdSense uses text-ads. Far from being low-tech, text ads are more effective than flashy ads. The clickthrough rate of text ads is proven to be higher than that of animated ads! More clicks equals more money, and text ads equals more clicks. Also…text ads are very “low weight” and very fast loading. The AdSense program will not slow your website, or your visitors, down. You can also use graphic ads.

AdSense is an application of AdWords beyond Google.com

Making “sense” of AdSense means understanding that it is really an offshoot of the older Google model, AdWords. But they are not the same thing.

Google AdWords:

If you have ever searched on Google, you have seen AdWords.

Google AdWords are the small text ads that are displayed on the side of the search results in Google. These ads are contextual of course – in this case the context is the search terms you entered. The ads will be served based on what you’re looking for. So, if you do a search on “printing services” you will get ads for printing services along with your search results!

How does this generate money for Google and the advertisers?

Google AdWords works on a model known as pay-per-click. When someone clicks on an AdWords ad, the advertiser of that ad has to pay Google a certain amount. It’s easy to track and fully automated.

We say “certain amount” because that amount is different all the time and is subject to market forces – in this case, bidding. Something has to determine the placement of those ads, and what determines it is how much the advertiser offers to pay per click. When you submit this kind of ad to Google, you submit it with a bid – which is compared to other bids for similar keywords. It’s an auction style process.

The position of the AdWords ads is based on the bidding amount of keywords of an ad. Obviously, the higher the bid, the higher the position the bid buys you. For instance, if the highest bid for the keywords “Internet marketing” is 80 cents per click, you can get top position by bidding 90 cents. Then every time someone clicks on your ad, Google would charge you 90 cents, and you would retain the top position until someone else bids more for the same search word placement.

Google AdSense, as stated earlier, is an extension of Google AdWords. It takes the AdWords concept and moves it off of Google’s search page and onto thousands of other web pages. The ads that are displayed on the websites are Google AdWords ads.

It’s good for the advertiser, who gets more and broader displays, for Google, who charge more for this program, for you, who will make money from the clickthroughs on your pages, and also for the consumer, who will see cool ads for stuff they are probably interested in!

So how exactly are you making money from all this? You earn a share of the pay-per-click amount, every time a visitor clicks on the ad. So you just need to get ads on your site…