One issue that surfaces occasionally in the contextualized advertising world is “cloaking”: presenting a different site to the Google robot than the one you present to users.
There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example, the robot could read all the information on your page related to forums, links and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular.
You could also find that your search engine listings are affected too: instead of appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to win you much traffic.
One solution is to strip the site down using Java script or one of the tools available online so that when the Google robot comes, it only reads the content.
Of course, you could also fool the robot into thinking that your site is about... well, anything really. You could spam Google into showing your site to anyone who was searching for And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether. Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your search engine rankings... or spam the search engines is a breach of Google’s TOS and could get you banned.
So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on your ads and ranking than your content?
The best — and simplest thing to do — is to make sure that the description and keyword meta tags are all filled in properly with terms relevant to your content.
Section Targeting can de-emphasize problematic areas of your website and might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try).
And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.
17.8 TrafficAndConversion.com
I said at the beginning of this chapter that this book is about AdSense and not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense than I do about search engine optimization.
We all have our strong points and AdSense is mine.
If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a result of me raiding his brain for some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should definitely check out his site and see what he has to say.
.png)