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February 01, 2005
Excellent appraisal of Google Adsense strengths and weaknesses
This is a very very exhaustive overview of the pros and cons, and minor details of the Google Adsense program. If there's anything I could say, this writer said it already:
- he highlighted the problem I wrote about a few days ago - that Google seems to be banning ethical publishers from Adsense for mysterious wrong-doing related to "invalid clicks".
- he explains something pretty important that I've already noticed myself - Google seems to take into account OFF PAGE relevance when targeting Adsense ads on your site. So for example if you have a soap related site and you link to it from a technical blog you could find yourself getting ads for the SOAP UNIX protocol (technical) or Soap Operas (media related as blogs are) - instead of text ads for the bubbly stuff you wash yourself with.
- he confirms that as a business partner, Google behaves like a God, holding all the cards and authority and not answering questions.
- he accepts that Google Adsense is a great program for monetizing otherwise un-monetizable articles on websites.
- at the bottom of the page there are interesting comments from other writers, including horror stories about unexplained Adsense account termination, with no explanation except identical emails from help desk bots.
My own conclusion is that Adsense is a great program, but any prudent webmaster ought to be involved with at least one competitor ad network at the same time - for safety reasons.
Posted by onelukey at February 1, 2005 03:12 PM
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