Inius Trivia

Archive for August, 2010

Wondering what this means? Well, it’s a verification code from an online social game that seems so interesting that I will share it with you: www.empireavenue.com.

It reminds me from Dreamshares.com, but Dreamshares was (“was”, because now is dead) about sports, while Empire Avenue it’s about social networking. You must buy and sell stocks in persons and become an influential person.

EAVB_HAJLUXHDCE

Following this post: Google Adsense Interest based advertising: what’s the problem? I made an experiment with two websites, let’s name them “website A” and “website B” . I de-actived the interest based ads for one week (so the ads have been displayed only on a “contextual” base), than activated again for another week.

Website A: highly targeted one. All the pages have one single theme. People come to this website because they want to find information related to the theme. They are coming from search engines only through a very limited set of targeted keywords.

Website B: a website with no clear theme. Basically, each page has its own theme. People come mostly from search engines, through specific searches.

Here are my findings:

Click through rate (CTR):

• for website A: the click rate was 2,39% in the “contextual week” and 2,23% in the “interest based week”
• for website B: the click rate was 2,77% in the “contextual week” and 3,05% in the “interest based week”

Page eCPM:

• for website A: “Avalue” during the “contextual week”, -7% during the “interest based week”
• for website B:  ”Bvalue” during the “contextual week”, +2% during the “interest based week”

So, the conclusions are crystal clear. Use “interest based advertising” when your website doesn’t have a general theme (for example if you run a local search directory, a free classifieds website, a news website etc.) and use only  “contextual” advertising when you run a highly targeted website.

Ok guys, dofollow links are alive on this blog since the very beginning, but I submitted my blog to some dofollow directories only 48 hours ago. And I’m already forced to change the posting rules. Here are the new rules:

• This blog is dofollow and will remain dofollow because I think that the original spirit of the internet is expressed in dofollow links, not nofollow.
• However, I will not accept keywords in anchor links. Please post with a name (eg. “Tom”, “John”, “Jimmy” etc.) otherwise I will modify your nickname. If you don’t want to show your name, no problem: you can sign as “domain”.
• The above rule should be taken into consideration by all the people, including those who have explicit domain names, such as “free-marketing-advice.com”. Just sign with a human name and I will treat you humanly.

So, don’t try to fool me, I’m more vigilant than you think. But let’s see now why I’m not accepting your keywords in my comments?

As  you probably know, one of the most important factors that Google takes into consideration when assesing a page are the anchor texts of outgoing links. So please understand that I will not allow a page that I want to see on top after keyword: “twitter marketing sucks” polluted with links such as: “seattle movers”, “childhood obesity facts” etc. You are doing SEO, I’m doing SEO, so let’s build a win-win situation, right?