Suffering from the Public Service Ads (PSA), RSS feed or blogging related ads?

Your not alone :)

It is time for a new project apart from DuoBlogger, and Hendrik advised me to buy an old domain rather than a whole website. So I went out and searched Google and ended up at some Indian website selling 10+ year old domains for $200 each. (yourmaindomain.com)
Now you might think, what’s the catch…..why selling them so cheap? Indeed the domains were all banned from Google’s index. However the good part was that the domains had an history of backlinks and still had an index in archive.org.

I wasn’t really looking for any specific niche because I was basing my niche on the domain name, i.e. if there was an domain name with iPhone apps in it – then I would go for the iPhone niche. Looking at domain names is a good way to find out what keywords you want to use to market your niche. Having the keywords already in the domain name has several advantages for SEO purposes.

Google tends to rank websites higher, which already have the keywords in the URL name, without having many backlinks pointing to their website.
Take for example; Blogger – it’s ugly – but once you let them host your domain – you benefit from their age, I believe blogger is like 6 years old (?). It’s easy to rank with blogger for niches which hardly have any competition (50,000 or less results) with just a few well placed backlinks from PR 6 and up.

Anyway so I added content to my Herbal Supplements blog (note: 11 years old :D registered in 1998 – The Google spiders visits the website every single hour) and a week later I slapped AdSense on it. It’s ugly, and that’s also my strategy – to let the visitors leave fast upon their arrival on my blog – by either clicking the back button or an ad. Tip: Do not let the users have to many options to look around the site as this will greatly reduce the chance of a user to click on any of the ads.
After 3 days I still had a major problem, the front page ads were as relevant as my grandma is with computers, thus getting near zero clicks. Only the sub pages were relevant. The theory behind this is that you (and especially me in this case) threw AdSense too early on the blog. The AdSense spiders still have an old page cached in their system thus giving you non relevant ads. (this is not the case with interest based ads – as they are cookie related)

Getting Rid of Non Relevant Ads on the Front Page

To resolve this issue, make sure to have some content on your website. Write your main keyword in the sidebar (in the widgets) and use a proper title and description on your blog. If you passed that then your ready to fix it. Hendrik told me simply RELOADING the page should fix it, however that was not the case for me as it took more than 3 days with 300 page reloads (designing phase) for any relevant ads to show up.

If you’re using wordpress – then you don’t have to do much – simply load another theme template (make sure you’re not using adsense in any widgets) and wait an hour before switching back. This will alert the AdSense bot that there are no ads to display on your website resulting in a complete reindex of your content in their system for your website once you put the theme back on.

Otherwise, when your not using a blogger platform, then you will have no other option then removing all the ads or wait weeks untill they reindex the website. Shame but it’s the truth.

If you’ve experienced the same and got something to correct/suggest to others, make an comment below as everybody will benefit from it.

Cheers,

Mark