In the ecuation of Adsense optimization income you need to chose the right markets, provide tons of quality content and achieve backlinks to your websites.

Link popularity, in a very simple definition, refers to the number of pages that link to a given web site. Incoming links are the most important factor in generating traffic for your site: they drive visitors directly to it and they are the most important element considered by search engines to determine the order of their search results. However, link popularity is not about receiving as many links as possible.

Link building is the process of researching, requesting and encouraging links to improve a web site’s link popularity. But, is this a SEO task? In order to answer this question we must define two types of incoming links that are often distinguished (specially by search engines) based on their nature:

• Natural links: Those that are due to the intrinsic nature of the Internet: people publish web pages and include links to resources that they consider useful for their visitors. Natural links are not requested, but given voluntarily and spontaneously. They use to have different anchor texts, are rarely reciprocal and increase gradually over the time. There is no direct way to get natural links for your site, unless offering a great content and wait for others to link to your pages.
• Artificial links: Those that are requested in any way: link exchanges, paid links… Search engines tend to ignore (or in abusive cases, even penalize) these kind of links. Artificial links use to have identical or similar anchor texts, are often reciprocal and increase suddenly when the link campaign starts.

  There is an even more obvious type of artificial links: link spamming. Take into account that not all artificial links are spam, but of course all spam links are artificial. Link spam techniques include:

• Link exchange programs and networks: Using automated or semi-automated methods of exchanging links between several sites.
• Link farms: Submitting a web site to pages with no other content than hundreds or thousands of links to other unrelated pages.
• Guestbook and forum spam: Posting useless comments in guestbooks, forums and other similar sites with the only purpose of including one or several links.
• Blog spam: Similar to the previous point. Making use of comments and trackbacks to post links in a blog.
• Hidden links: Including links on a web site that are indexable for search engines but invisible for humans. These links are usually used to create link networks in order to increase the link popularity of the participant sites.
• Referrer log spam: Some sites have a referrer log that shows which pages link to them. This technique consists of making automated accesses to that site from a link placed on a spammer’s page, so the log will include a link to the spammer’s site.

Search engines are the main reason why link spam exists, specially since Google started considering link popularity as one of the most important ranking factors and created a measure for it (PageRank). However, those same search engines are now the main link spam fighters. Link spam techniques are severely penalized, and you should avoid them for any succesful and long-term search engine marketing campaign.
According to the above, artificial links are useless or even harmful for your web site, and natural links can’t be obtained in an artificial way, so, how do SEOs work on the link building strategy?:

• The zone between natural and artificial linking: There is a thin, vaguely defined, zone between both types of linking. It’s something artificial in the way that it’s requested, and it’s natural in the way that it corresponds to the nature of Internet: making submissions to very relevant and high-quality directories, sending emails to webmasters that could be legitimately interested in your web site (and could potentially link to it), encouraging links in any way… These techniques won’t harm but, on the contrary, could ultimately improve your web site’s link popularity.
• Masked artificial linking: A risky strategy consisting on getting artificial links and trying to make them look natural to search engines: Exchanging non-reciprocal links, paying for them in a few very popular sites, varying their anchor texts, getting them gradually over months and not in a few days… Currently people use to mix the terms SEO and link building. So, to make it clear, these are different but complementary concepts:

SEO is a wider concept than link building as it includes the optimization of on-the-page factors. Link building is a wider concept than SEO as it includes other marketing strategies aimed to improve the web site’s quality and exposure and hence encourage the natural links to it.

Since Google AdSense launched, there has been rumors and speculation about the possibility of the AdSense bot (officially known as the “Mediapartners-Google/2.1″ and unofficially as the “mediabot”) including some of its information into the regular Google search index. But no one has ever seemed to have concrete evidence of this happening. Some webmasters have maintained some discussions with Matt Cutts over the past few years about this issue, and they have always been assured that they are completely separate and they are always careful the two never cross contaminate each other.

But on SEO Rockstars this week, Greg Boser (aka WebGuerrilla) mentioned that he had seen mediabot information showing up in the natural search index, and my ears perked up. The end result was a whole bunch of duplicate content due to the fact that we were serving the AdSense bot the old url, and Googlebot the new one. The first one is taken from this site (JenSense.com). The following two are from a site URL I cannot reveal, but I included them to illustrate the problem is across multiple sites and covering multiple date ranges (JenSense is indexed regularly and there were no cache dates back that far).

First off, the AdSense support site clearly states that the two bots serve complete different purposes and should not affect the other.

“While our bot (starting with ‘Mediapartners-Google’) does crawl content pages for the purpose of targeting ads, this crawl is not associated with our main index crawl.”

There is the possibility that there was an accidental cross over taking place if the AdSense team was keeping cached copies of the pages serving AdSense for quality checking purposes, such as checking to see if a publisher is serving the mediabot something different than what Joe Surfer sees when visiting the page.

I could not find any evidence of multiple sites I checked that were not already indexed getting any sort of indexing boost via the mediabot. Webmasters usually wouldn’t think to include the mediabot in any special headers or robots.txt instructions they have for the regular googlebot.

You can read the whole article at Jense.com

In a previous article I talked about the 3 Google Adsense Success Factors. But if you already have a website, you can increase your adsense income almost immediately improving your Clickthrough Ratio (Adsense CTR) The 2 other factors (Website traffic and Income per click) can also be improved but they will take more time.

First you need to study carefully the optimization tips provided by Google at:

http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

One of the things that set Adsense apart from other banner ad programs is your ability to customize the code to fit the look of your site, and the wide variety of unit sizes available. As a website publisher you can control the following components.

1. Text Color
2. Background Color
3. Border Color
4. Ad Format
5. Ad Placement
6. Number Of Appearing Ads

You can control these components, but you can’t control the copy of the shown ads because advertisers write the ads which are then shown on your site. Therefore, in this way, there is a limit on what kind of optimization you can perform. You can’t make advertisers write better ads afterall, luckily though Google is constantly analyzing advertisements and ones that do not get clicked on end up filtered out or shown less often.

In future articles I will analyze in detail how to optimize each of these components.