Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

Here’s an SEO trick you may have heard: placing Google Adsense advertisements on your new website will get your pages indexed sooner since Adsense relies on knowing what your site is about. Or perhaps you’ve heard the opposite (from an SEO friend of a friend): Placing Google Adsense on your new site will actually undermine your ranking because Google will think you are a spammer/domainer. So which one is correct?

We built two similar pages with similar keyword densities, page rank, etc. and placed a Google Adsense ad on one page, no ad on the other. After just a few days, the page without our Google Adsense code was indexed and a full week later the page WITH the Google ad was finally indexed. Even today the non-Adsense page is listed first in Google search results.

So what does Yahoo! think about all this? Yahoo! prefers the page without the ad which shouldn’t come as a suprise given that these two are bitter rivals. Well, maybe not that bitter since Yahoo! is itself a Google Adsense publisher these days but you get the point. Perhaps Yahoo! is jealous of us

So what does this mean? Should we take down the Google Adsense ads from our web pages to improve search engine rankings? The answer for me is no, especially given the revenue these ads generate for my sites. However, if you’re building a new site you may want to hold off on the Google Adsense ads until your site has been indexed and you’re generating at least a few “real” visits per day that can be monetized.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 7:46 am and is filed under Search engine ranking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.