I’ve been a webmaster for five years now. It’s been an up and down ride. I guess a lot of people dream about giving up their job and running their own business. Google’s Adsense has enabled me to do exactly that. If you’re prepared to work hard, and you have some writing ability or maybe the ability to organize facts in a more useful way than anyone else, or the ability to write a neat script to present something in a new way or maybe make cool videos, you might be able to give up your job and make a living entirely from Adsense earnings.
Me? I do it by writing. I write a lot of articles on a lot of websites. Most of the traffic to these websites comes from Google’s search engine. Averaging over all of these websites, about one visitor in about 50 might click one of the Google ads displayed on the site. Google shares the revenue from each click in the ratio 67:33 Me:Google. People’s mileage varies on this. From studying claims of various webmasters on different websites and by running ads in very prominent positions on my sites, then not prominent at all, I’d guess that some websites are capable of getting clicks from maybe 1 in 10 visitors, while at the other extreme other sites might be getting clicks from one in 500 visitors.
There was a time when a lot of webmasters were stacking the upper part of their pages full of ads in order to increase the number of visitors who would click on ads. It really is amazing the difference in ad clicks a site can get when ads are placed at the top of the page compared with lower down. Earlier this year, Google (the search engine) introduced its page layout algorithm.
Google (the search engine) says it got feedback from users that they were fed up clicking through onto websites and getting a faceful of ads when they arrived. In January Google changed the way its search engine worked to penalize sites that had, in Google’s view, too many ads in the upper part of pages.
Luckily for me I only had a couple of minor sites that were hit by this. Both of them lost about 30% of their visitors, because they dropped to lower positions in Google’s search results. At the end of January, I removed ads from the top of these pages. As yet, I’ve seen no recovery in the search results, and no recovery of traffic. According to Google (the search engine) recovery would happen within a few weeks. No other webmasters who I’ve spoken to have seen recovery either, so maybe Google wasn’t quite telling the whole story when they gave a timescale for recovery.
Over the years there have been plenty of ups and downs as Google (the search engine) changes its emphasis on the sort of sites it wants to see prospering. You’ll hear webmasters who’ve been in the game for a long time talking about ‘Florida,’ a major change to Google’s algorithm that hurt a lot of webmasters. We’re talking about a zero sum game so the same change must also have made a lot of webmasters happy. People who are unhappy tend to talk more about it on forums and blogs.
The Panda looks cute, but Google's version bit a lot of webmasters.
The most recent big change to Google search was the ‘Panda’ which again seems to have made a lot of people unhappy. The idea of ‘Panda’ was to punish ‘content farms’. These are sites that publish articles about anything and everything hoping to generate traffic to get ad clicks.
If you can cope with a job that’s always changing, with regular kicks in the teeth possible when Google changes its search algorithm, then you should consider creating web content and placing Google Adsense on the page. Despite the ups and downs I’ve had, I make more money from it each year than I ever did in a regular job. I work like crazy for weeks on end, but there are times that I do nothing for weeks apart from checking that the websites I own are working.
I’ll write something on this site occasionally. I’ll try to make sure it’s helpful and not just a random collection of stream of consciousness witterings.