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Ads making sense?

Sometimes it’s really amazing to watch how the google adwords service reacts to content changes on this page… Three pope related posts, and ads for Benedict related services are displayed. Impressive, but I suppose, not too helpful for most blogs, where the content of archive pages is probably as important as the index page when it comes to determining the target group.

Maybe they should not only try to see blog posts as a content unit, but also offer a possibiltiy to adjust the speed of ad-content adjustment to avoid temporary outliers like the pope-related one…

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advertisement, almost a diary, self-referential

My two cents.

Last week, I read somewhere that google-ad clickthrough rates are to increase significantly if the ads are placed between the posts as opposed to being placed alongside.

Well, from my experience, whoever claimed this correlation was probably just lucky. Personally, I can’t really see any change in the clickthrough rates – it’s still in the 0.1 % range, although other google ad users claim to have far better rates.

So I can confidently announce that this is not a money making blog, as opposed to the ones mentioned in this cyberjournalist report. But then again, it is also true that my little proto-diary has not yet shredded the career of any prominent politician…

For the moment, the average daily “turnover” of this blog reflects what it means to me – my very own two cents (well, Dollar cents…).

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quicklink

google-esque

I’m not sure if you noticed, but google ad-words seems to be particularly attentive to certain keywords. A single “quicklink” mentioning the generous HIV-related policies of a German company in AIDS-ridden South Africa led to a constant display of HIV related ads for several weeks now.
Hmm, it may also have something to do with the fact that I haven’t really updated a lot in the last months…

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16 clicks.

Have you ever seen the google ad sense advertisements in the right column? They have been up since July 16th and have been clicked on by approximately 12 people, as I did actually click on five of them over the last months.
I think the idea of adjusting advertisment to content (aka readers’ and writers’ interests) is quite valuable.

On the other hand, if this service is used as sluggishly on other sites as it is here, then I very much doubt its economic viability… oh, and by the way, at the current clickrate I will only need to keep this site for another 49 and a half years to receive my first check from google ;).

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Allgemein

Blogger & Google.

You probably remember that the acquistition of Blogger by search engine provider Google made the tech-headlines three weeks or so ago. Well, if I remember correctly, the bottom line of most commentator’s reasoning was that google wanted to buy Blogger because the vast content of the blogosphere on their servers would provide important additional input for the Google system of finding and ranking web pages.

May I say that they clearly have a long way to go. And if aynone asked me, my first suggestion would be to think of individual post in a blog as content-units and treat them accordingly in search requests. All those of you with a site of their own will immediately understand what I am talking about when I say that just 5 five minutes ago, someone found my page through a google search for the term “email addresses guestbook of private people in albania”. I do understand that by writing this, I am making this page a prime target for the next person looking for Albanians with internet access.

But until today, there was no particular reason to list my page in the results for this search apart from the fact that the words “Albania” and “Email” once appeared in the same HTML document.

And you know what’s even weirder? The person looking for Albanians found my site through this search even though it is listed on page three of the results! My search rank for this particular search is 28! Assuming that he/she did not directly jump to link #28, my page was not the only one misinterpreted by Google. It will certainly be interesting to see how things will change as BLOOGLER gets going.

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