I think we’ve all had the problem before as webmasters. You know, you add a new page or create a new website and the Google Adsense ads are completely off topic and irrelevant. And we’ve heard the standard solutions to fix the problem, and in many cases they work as intended. The problem is this: What if highly relevant ads are not generating the profit, the CTR, and the interest of your visitors?

This is a current problem I am struggling with. The site in question is what many would consider an authority. It gets good traffic, has plenty of natural backlinks, great organic search positions, and of course a significant amount of traffic. The problem is that the people visiting the page are not interested in the ads that Google believes should be displayed. The ads I think should be displayed pay ten times as much and receive twice the CTR when they are displayed. The problem is displaying them permanently.

If you notice in my previous posts, PageRank has been a big issue lately.  The 9/26/2008 PR update had some major problems, some of which included pages only days old getting assigned PR.  It appears Google has responded to this outcry and has rolled back the PR to its previous state on 9/25/2008.

At first there was a lot of commotion about the 9/26/2008 PR update.  Many deserving Websites lost PR and new pages, not even a week old, gained PR.  After some thought, I wonder if the PR update we saw was Google’s internal PR being exported.  The evidence seems to point in that direction.

As I noted in my last post, the latest Google PR update on 9/26/2008 was quite abnormal.  Deserving sites that should have got PR actually lost PR.  Undeserving and/or sites not promoted gained PR.  The day after this PR update, and on Google’s birthday, Webmasters are lashing out at Google.  Some are even calling Google’s PR algorithm as being broken and badly neglected.

Here’s some highlights of the talk going on…

In this Digital Point post, a Website owner claims that he received a PR 3 on a page that he posted just yesterday.  He claims it is not even indexed in Google Search yet.

Also in the same thread, this post from another Webmaster claims he received a PR 2 from a blog post he made just days prior.

Well, here comes yet another Google PR update.  It seems that with each update I am left scratching my head how and why Google calculates PR.

I’m not going to name any URLs, but just visualize this.  Two PR 3 directories, which were created about the same time, each having a much different backlink profile.  I will take a look at these in more detail in this post.

The first PR 3 directory has a total of 905 backlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer.  Looking at these backlinks, I can see that none have any PR.  In fact, most of the links are from other directories.

In the forums, I see a lot of people posting how successful they are with Adsense, and soon to follow comes dozens of replies asking what the niche is.  The original poster normally never gives away their niche or only offers a very general idea.  The question is, if a profitable and low competition niche was dropped right in your lap could you monetize it?

I’ve been keeping an eye on a specific forum topic about a supposed high paying site that earns just under five figures per month in revenue.  What is interesting about this topic is that a lot of people criticized the poster for what they believe is impossible.  But on closer inspection, this very simple site might be earning a boatload of money.

Many in the Webmaster community have been complaining of reduced Google Adsense earnings since the beginning of the year.  It appears we may finally have some answers as to why earnings are down.

Data released on Monday by comScore reports that in January, surfers clicked on 7% fewer ads then the previous month.  Additionally, paid clicks were flat compared to the same period last year.

As most Adsense publishers know, late last year Google modified Adsense ads by making only the Title and URL of the ad clickable.  While reducing accidental clicks and improving value for the advertiser, this has resulted in lower income for Google and their publishers.

I always get a kick out of the Pagerank (PR) debate that occurs in the webmaster community.  This is one of those hot topics where about half the people say Pagerank means nothing while the other half believes it does.  I personally side with those that believe Pagerank is important.

It seems that most everyone refuses to look at Google’s own explanation of Pagerank.  A quote from this page notes:

PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google believes are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.