Wisegeek must be BANKING it with adsense...
- SEO |
I always think it a good strategy to investigate the tactics of those who are 'doing successfully' that which you wish to do. Wisegeek has got to be a good example and I think we can learn a lot from them.
Looking at alexa, they are currently ranked #1079 in the world... that's a mighty number of pageviews and when you think their pages all seem to have adsense on them; very artfully constructed with links blending in to content... their monthly check from the big G must be astronomical.
Note how the ad placement is "in your face". The entire page is clearly highly fine tuned for CTR. It "forces your eye" to look over the ads as you attempt to read the content. There's nowhere else for the eye to go. This leads to higher CTR and you can be sure that with these kinds of pageview numbers available for tweaking, wisegeek's placement is the result of much testing (results of which in their case must be almost instantaneously observable).
Seems their business model is v. similar to that of eHow... dig through keyword results for long tail multi-word questions; outsource article creation and optimize the pages for these exact phrases, catching higher traffic through exact match titles and low offsite link building.
It's a numbers game. Not all the pages hit the top 10, but with huge numbers of pages the overall volume of traffic and the revenue goes skywards. Search string inurl:wisegeek dot com shows up 971,000 results.
Perhaps the only sad part of this model is that the truly high quality content on other, smaller expert sites is often buried by the mass amounts of this stuff online. Small websites get buried by million-pagers such as these. Someone well known in IM affectionately referred to these type of pages as "sh*thead subpages" which rank well due to domain authority. You can beat them on individual keywords with link building, quite easily... but with 971,000 pages online, they really don't care to sweat the small stuff.
I also like to think of companies like this as a kind of "canary in a coal mine"... in other words, if they are doing something for a long period of time and not getting banned, it must be ok.
Which leads me to my question: I thought you could only have 3 adsense blocks per page; also I thought the biggest size available was 768x90, how come I have observed wisegeek seeming to exceed these guidelines and get away with it??
I am looking at the page code and don't quite get it, seems there is only one adsense block in the code. Are they doing something clever with Javascript and CSS?
Other notes - no doubt they have an advanced Content Management System which auto-generates the links at the foot of the page; but the overall content appears not to be scraped although it does appear on a few other pages (who probably copied from WG).
Anyway IMO wisegeek is a masterful piece of IM; over to you, I'd love to hear your input.
Looking at alexa, they are currently ranked #1079 in the world... that's a mighty number of pageviews and when you think their pages all seem to have adsense on them; very artfully constructed with links blending in to content... their monthly check from the big G must be astronomical.
Note how the ad placement is "in your face". The entire page is clearly highly fine tuned for CTR. It "forces your eye" to look over the ads as you attempt to read the content. There's nowhere else for the eye to go. This leads to higher CTR and you can be sure that with these kinds of pageview numbers available for tweaking, wisegeek's placement is the result of much testing (results of which in their case must be almost instantaneously observable).
Seems their business model is v. similar to that of eHow... dig through keyword results for long tail multi-word questions; outsource article creation and optimize the pages for these exact phrases, catching higher traffic through exact match titles and low offsite link building.
It's a numbers game. Not all the pages hit the top 10, but with huge numbers of pages the overall volume of traffic and the revenue goes skywards. Search string inurl:wisegeek dot com shows up 971,000 results.
Perhaps the only sad part of this model is that the truly high quality content on other, smaller expert sites is often buried by the mass amounts of this stuff online. Small websites get buried by million-pagers such as these. Someone well known in IM affectionately referred to these type of pages as "sh*thead subpages" which rank well due to domain authority. You can beat them on individual keywords with link building, quite easily... but with 971,000 pages online, they really don't care to sweat the small stuff.
I also like to think of companies like this as a kind of "canary in a coal mine"... in other words, if they are doing something for a long period of time and not getting banned, it must be ok.
Which leads me to my question: I thought you could only have 3 adsense blocks per page; also I thought the biggest size available was 768x90, how come I have observed wisegeek seeming to exceed these guidelines and get away with it??
I am looking at the page code and don't quite get it, seems there is only one adsense block in the code. Are they doing something clever with Javascript and CSS?
Other notes - no doubt they have an advanced Content Management System which auto-generates the links at the foot of the page; but the overall content appears not to be scraped although it does appear on a few other pages (who probably copied from WG).
Anyway IMO wisegeek is a masterful piece of IM; over to you, I'd love to hear your input.
If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.
"If there is no door, it becomes necessary to break out through the wall."