Google's algorithm has placed more weight on core domain authority, and Weblogs Inc has decided to kill off many of their lower end niche brands.

Google trusts bloggers a lot, but AdSense generally sucks as a monetization method. It turns out some upstart websites are buying up bloggers. In this video, Babble stated they are hiring 10 of top 50 parenting bloggers. If you hire a half dozen well known work at home mom bloggers part time for $1,000 per month you can leverage their knowledge, reach, mindshare, and link equity. If you can mesh them into a community feel without running into ego problems you become the topical expert for just about any topic in the world ... for $6,000 a month.

In much the same way that people are buying older trusted domains, don't be surprised to see 2007 as a year which many monetization and business experts partner with many naive amatures to create scalable businesses that displace the market position of many of the larger conglomerates like About.com, one vertical at a time.

As faking authority and leveraging older signs of trust get less and less profitable business owners will need to become the topical experts they were pretending to be. As the market for ad dollars, audience, and talent get more and more competitive people skills are going to be increasingly important.

Technorati and Google Blogsearch will tell you who is trusted. Go out and buy them while they are still cheap!

I am still a fan of AdSense as a way of determining a baseline income potential for a site, but I don't see it as a long-term viable business model for most small publishers. Why?

Smart Pricing (or Maybe Dumb Publishing?)

I friend told me how much he made from AdSense a year ago, and in spite of increasing his network pageviews 200% since then his earnings this month are 10% lower than they were a year ago.

And Google still does a sloppy job policing their partner network. What happens if their editorial review costs increase. What does that do to the percent of ad income Google needs to keep to keep growing?

A Glut of Publishing:

It is getting easier and easier to publish online. The number of people writing is probably growing at a faster rate than the number (and income of) of people reading, which means you will have to be more compelling and put more effort into your content and marketing if you want to keep your pageviews up.

And Google has been placing more weight on authoritative domains, which is squeezing many small players out of ranking in the search results.

Newspaper & Magazine Archives: More Glut:

As business deals are worked out, and trusted archived content comes online, many business models based on AdSense spam will lose a large portion of their traffic to mainstream media companies that are not currently fully leveraging their archives.

If Google bought YouTube how long before they buy Olive Software or create a similar technology?

Frothy Ad Market:

I just saw a big, ugly, and obtrusive AOL ad on Amazon.com's home page. If people are buying general untargeted graphic ads on the largest retail site they must be overpaying for it.

A Lack of Competition:

Some of the executives of Yahoo!'s Publisher program recently announced they were quiting, and with Google's lead in the contextual ad space with virtually no competition, I have to take that as a bad sign for Yahoo!, and for independent publishers in general.

Google's General Arrogance:

Today many publishers noticed bright Google logos in their ad boxes inviting readers to sign up for AdSense.

Potential Text Ad Blindness:

People have learned to ignore banners and common ad locations. How long until people learn to ignore common AdSense formats, especially as the ads appear so prevalently on so many sites? What if people become more receptive to identifying ads (even in the content area)?

Not Worth It:

Add all those up and it gets a bit bleak looking to AdSense as anything more than a baseline estimate for effortless income or a backfill for unsold inventory.

What if instead of monetizing every page, niche publishers used most of their pages to keep attention and link equity flowing their way, and then just monetized targeted high value sections of their sites using well integrated affiliate offers and/or selling direct products?

SEO Question: I was thinking about buying Google AdWords and AdSense ads or placing AdSense on my site. Will doing any of these increase my link count, Google rankings, or rankings in other search engines?

Answer: PPC ads go through redirects, so they do not count toward your link popularity, but there are other ways to tie together PPC ads and organic search placement. Search engines claim there is no direct linkage between buying ads and ranking, but they only talk in ideals because it helps reinforce their worldview and help them make more money.

Buying AdWords Ads

What They Won't Tell You:
Highly commercial keywords may have the associated editorial results go through more relevancy filters and/or be editorially reviewed for relevancy more frequently. Also, because they want people to click on the AdWords ads there is a heavy informational bias on the oranic search results.

I know some people who have large ad spends that get notifications of new ad system changes ahead of time, and others who get to give direct feedback to allow them to participate in cleaning up search results and minimizing unfair competing actions in the ad systems. So that is one type of cross-over / feedback that exists, but I think that tends to be more rare, and the more important cross over / feedback that exists is an indirect one.

Just by Being Real
You can't really explain why and how everyone does what they do. Some people who find your product and enjoy it enough to leave glowing testimonials will even tell you that they don't know how they found it.

In the same way that targeted ads can lead to purchases, they can also lead to an increase in mindshare, brand, reach, usage data, and linkage data. Just by being real and being seen you are going to pick up quality signals. If you try to factor all of those into your ad buys most markets are still under-priced.

Cross Over Due to Buying AdWords:
A well thought out pay per click campaign can feed into your SEO campaign more ways than I can count. Here are a few examples.

Integrating Offline & Online:
In a TV commercial Pontiac told people to search Google, and got a ton of press.

Big Controversial Ads:
Mazda quickly bid on Pontiac.

Many companies also have strong ties between the legal and marketing departments. If buying or selling an ad gets you sued and gets you in the news the value of the news coverage can far exceed the cost of the ads and legal fees.

Small Controversial Ads:
When I was newer to the field one friend called me the original link spammer. He meant it as a compliment, and I still take it as one. In much the same way I was an aggressive link builder, I was also quite aggressive at ad buying.

I caused controversy by buying names of other people in the industry as AdWords ads. I was prettymuch a total unknown when I did that, but some of the top names in the industry elevated my status by placing my name in heated discussion about what was fair and reasonable or not.

You can always consider placing controversial / risky ideas or ads against your brand or competing brands as a way to generate discussion (but of course consider legal ahead of time).

Drafting Off New Words & Industry News:
When the nigritude ultramarine SEO contest started I bid on AdWords. Some people discussing the contest mentioned that I bid on that word. If an event bubbles up to gain mainstream coverage and you make it easy to identify your name as being associated with it then you might pick up some press coverage.

Industry buzz words that are discussed often have significant mindshare, get searched for frequently, and larger / bureaucratic competitors are going to struggle to be as plugged into the market as you are or react as quickly to the changing language.

Snagging a Market Position Early:
When a friend recommended I read the TrustRank research paper in February of last year I knew it was going to become an important idea (especially because that same friend is brilliant, helped me more ways and times than I can count, and was the guy who came up with the idea of naming the Google Dances).

I read it and posted a TrustRank synopsis. In addition to trying to build a bit of linkage for that idea I also ensured that I bought that keyword on AdWords. Today I rank #1 in Google for TrustRank, and I still think I am the only person buying that keyword, which I find fascinating given how many people use that word and how saturated this market is.

Buying AdSense Ads

Buying Ads Creates Content:
If your ads are seen on forums people may ask about your product or brands. I know I have seen a number of threads on SEO forums that were started with something like I saw this SEO Book ad and I was wondering what everyone thought of it. Some people who start talking about you might not even click your ads.

Each month my brand gets millions and millions of ad impressions at an exceptionally reasonable price, especially when you factor in the indirect values.

Appealing to an Important Individual:
I have seen many people advertise on AdSense targeting one site at a time, placing the webmaster's name in the ad copy. It may seem a bit curt for some, but it is probably more likely to get the attention of and a response from a person than if you request a link from them.

Ads are another type / means of communication.

Appealing to a Group of People:
I get a ton of email relating to blogs and blogging. And in Gmail I keep seeing Pew Internet ads over and over and over again. Their ads range from Portrait of a Blogger to Who are Bloggers?

Going forward they will have added mindshare, link equity, and a report branded with that group of people. When people report on blogging or do research about blogging in the future the Pew report is likely to be referenced many times.

Selling AdSense Ads

Don't Sell Yourself Short:
Given the self reinforcing nature of links (see Filthy Linking Rich) anything that undermines your authority will cause you to get less free exposure going forward. So you really have to be careful with monetization. If you do it for maximal clickthough rate that will end up costing you a lot of trust and link equity.

There are other ways to improve your AdSense CTR and earnings without costing your credibility and authority.

More tips:

• AdSense Tips and Linkworthy Content

• Tracking AdSense Ad Clicks by Page and Keyword
• Track Google AdSense Clicks via Google Analytics

Don't Monetize Too Early:
Given the lack of monetization ability of a new site with few visitors and the importance of repeat visits in building trust and mindshare you don't want to monetize a new site too aggressively unless it is an ecommerce type site. It is hard to build authority if people view your site as just enough content to wrap around the AdSense.

Spam, Footprints, & Smart Pricing:
In the past search engines may have discounted pages that had poison words on them. Search is all about math / communication / patterns.

If your site fits the footprints of many spammy sites then your site might be flagged for review or reduced in authority. MSN did research on detecting spam via footprints, and link spam detection based on mass estimation shows how power laws could make it easy to detect such footprints.

Graywolf recently noted that landing page slippage may be an input into landing page and site quality scores for AdWords ad buyers. Google could also use AdSense account earnings or AdSense CTR data to flag sites for editorial reviews, organic search demotion, ad payout reduction, or smart pricing.

Some people are up in arms about the idea of Wikipedia adding ads to their site. The issue is not that ads are hated. The true issue with the Wikipedia and advertising is this:

The issue is not targeting or relevancy... the issue is that some will feel it is bait and switch. That something they thought was pure and easy to believe in now suddenly is part of the real world.

The truth is that the Wikipedia has always been chuck full of ads. I am not talking about the link spam that people sneak in, or when people promote their own brands, I am talking about the mindset with which Wikipedia articles are drafted. Lets look at the search engine optimization article.

Classification:

First of all, lets start with the classification and associated fields:

Even Google's guidance on hiring an SEO, which is quite biased (and self serving) in nature, probably is not as biased as the Wikipedia's classification of SEO.

Now lets compare that frame of reference to the opinion of Google's lead engineer in charge of search quality. From my interview with Matt Cutts, where I asked Is all SEO spam? His response was:

Absolutely not--I need to do a post about this on my blog sometime. Lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam at all.

The way Wikipedia classifies SEO is an advertisement biased against the entire field of SEO, and thus acts as an ad for search engines and pay per click marketing.

Accepted Types of Information:

I knew that directly linking to my site or directly marketing myself on Wikipedia was not going to go to far with them generally hating the field of SEO so much. On the other hand, I knew their vile hatred of the field meant that me mentioning Traffic Power and linking to articles about Traffic Power that link to my site would stay in that article forever. And they have stuck thusfar.

Framing:

The Wikipedia states:

When discovered, search engines may take action against those found to be using unethical SEO methods.

Why is ethics even tied to SEO techniques? Machines can't have ethics. When their results are inaccurate that must be the fault of some external third party with low ethical standards? What is that?

Participation:

From Rough Type:

"Wikipedia hasn't been a real 'wiki' where anyone can write and edit for quite a while now." A few months ago, in the wake of controversies about the quality and reliability of the free encyclopedia's content, the Wikipedian powers-that-be - its "administrators" - abandoned the work's founding ideal of being the "ULTIMATE 'open' format" and tightened the restrictions on editing. In addition to banning some contributors from the site, the administrators adopted an "official policy" of what they called, in good Orwellian fashion, "semi-protection" to prevent "vandals" (also known as people) from messing with their open encyclopedia.

There is a bias toward those who want to talk down or shine a negative light on the field of SEO while true topical experts are driven off. Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page mentioned Danny Sullivan in some of their early research, and yet Wikipedians ran him out of the topic. Danny is probably the single most authoritative voice on search.

Incentive:

If I know my words are probably going to get edited out of the Wikipedia where is the incentive for me to put effort into editing there when my work is much more likely to be respected and profitable if I put it on my own site?

Staleness:

Not only does the classification and writing within Wikipedia reinforce the worldview pushed by the most powerful associated commercial entity (Google), but the types of things that are reference worthy are "famous" SEOs, which is going to be inherently biased toward people who established strong brands many years ago.

Which of the listed famous SEOs have entered the field this decade? None of them.

I have no doubt in my mind that many people newer to the SEO market than I know far more than I do.

Also as fields and language itself evolve will the large cross referenced content base that is the Wikipedia even be able to keep up with rapidly changing markets or linguistic changes?

General Factual Errors:

The SEO article on Wikipedia also states

Yahoo! and MSN Search do not automatically punish entire websites for small amounts of hidden text. Google's market share of daily searches has fallen rapidly from 75% to 56% over the past few years, as other search engines find many web pages that Google has banned and cannot display due to Google's severely limited index.

One would have to live under a rock, having no access website referral logs, the news, or financial markets to believe that Google has been drastically losing market share to competing search companies.

The ease with which people can edit the Wikipedia creates a bias toward quickly adding incorrect factoids, while discouraging true topical experts from participating, especially if their opinion is likely to get edited out if it does not conform to the flavor of the day group-think.

One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth "whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to" is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population, while a robust confidence is one's own views apparently is. If there is a systemic bias in Wikipedia, it is to have ignored so far these inescapable facts.

Conclusion:

I know one article is a small sample, and am not saying that I think the Wikipedia is a bad source for everything, just that in rapidly changing fields of commercial interests the Wikipedia is one of the last sources I would trust for an accurate view of the market. It is more representative of an advertisement that the most powerful sources in a market tell people that they should be thinking about.

Not sure if this idea exists already, but it would be a cool project idea for anyone ambitious enough to do it. What about creating a social network site that leverages famous poems, speeches, and quotations, and integrated them into the web by allowing submitters to add links to famous text that existed before the web. The links could show

• how the meanings of words changed over time

• how static human nature is
• how politicians lie and lied
• how religious material changes over time
• how bogus and misguided most forms of patriotism are
• whether cultural norms should change
• or anything else you are interested in

There is a lot of marketing potential in history. Google realizes it, and is already exploiting it, but not to its full potential. Invariably traditional publishers are losing control due to network efficiency. Warner is already threatening to sue Google over YouTube, but YouTube just sold for 1.65 billion. I think historical text (and maybe personalized versions of it) is another vertical which is low hanging fruit like video once was.

Part of Google's move toward trying to be the default hard drive for different types of information is such that they can add context to whatever you are doing. Some of that context will be relevant ads, but the other piece of it will be useful related ideas based on other's usage data.

I think the best way to make the wisdom of the past appealing to a wide audience would be by making it interactive and showing how it is relevant to today. Some amount of that can be automated, but given how many people are trying to interpret the meaning of lyrics and how layered great writing is you would think there is a market for adding personalized or opinionated context to historical text.