Adsense: Site Diagnostics

Adsense has just introduced a site diagnostics tool. The diagnostics tool can be viewed under your reports tab and will show you if there is any problems accessing the pages of your site(s).

People using Sitemaps will be familiar with the interface and reporting style. If the Adsense crawler is having trouble reaching any of your pages, you'll see those URLs listed in the Blocked URLs section of the Site Diagnostics table.

You will either see a "URL not found" or "Robots.txt" error. In the first case it means that your server might have been temporarily down or that there was some other error accessing the page. The "Robots.txt" error signifies that your Robot.txt file is preventing the crawler from accessing pages.

Adwords landing page quality

A recent Adwords blog post highlights some interesting changes to the Adwords program. Each landing page will be assigned a quality score based on how useful that page would be to a potential visitor. Pages with a low quality score will then have to pay higher minimum bids for their ads to be shown.

This move is an attempt to curb MFA (Made for Adsense) sites, spam sites and other sites that offer no real content except the ads they are showing. Google hopes that this will make it much less profitable for those types of sites to generate revenue using the Adword advertising network.

This is definitely a step in the right direction. Most legitimate web publishers will agree that spam and MFA sites are the bane of the Internet. Making it more expensive for them to attract visitors will definitely increase the quality and user experience for visitors clicking on Adsense ads.

This is not only good for advertisers, but also for publishers using Adsense to show ads on their sites. If visitors grow accustomed to getting high quality sites by clicking on Adsense ads, they will be more likely to click and convert for both the advertiser and publisher.

Google stresses that most Adwords advertisers won’t be affected by this change. However they provide the following guidelines for creating high quality landing pages:

• Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.


• Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text.


• Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.


• Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.


• In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.


• You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).

It’s good to see that Google still puts their users first!