17 replies to this topic

[mcanerin]

OK, just for fun I'm signing up for AdSense, basically in the spirit of adventure, and the fact that I like to know how things work. I certainly don't expect to make much money (if any).

I'm reading the fine print and something jumps out at me - Google monitors the page that the AdSense is on. Obviously it must, right? Big Deal.

But...

As Google points out,, the page must be spiderable so it can be checked. This implies they check it (duh). This also implies the page is added to a database somewhere, and, presumably, ranked.

AdSense is free...

Question: Lets say you had a difficult page to index, like a flash site or a buried dynamic page or whatever. Would putting AdSense on a page like that encourage G to visit?

What about indexing? They obviously index AdSense more often than some smaller, not well linked sites. this could be a way to get the Googlebot to visit a page quickly that otherwise may have taken awhile to get there.

One potential drawback is that if AdSense used a different bot or database than the "normal" bots, then this presumably would not help. Does anyone know if this is a potential way of accomplishing "PFI" for Google? Not true PFI, of course, but you seee what I mean. I know they try to keep advertising and results separate, but I don't see a reason they would keep it THAT separate, since it presumably would not make any ranking difference at all.

Anyone know if it makes any difference at all? More frequent updates, ranking, etc?

Ian

[Vertster]

I was wondering this myself. I have read differing takes on whether or not this is true. I ran my own tests, and observed the following results:

- Yes Googlebot will come calling, usually within minutes of your page with adsense code going online.
- No, it appears to have no difference in the speed with which your page will actually appear in the index

Some people say its not even the same Googlebot, although it looked authentic to me, except it didn't really do too much other than look at my adsense injected page.

Its hard to tell, because on most sites, Googlebot visits every day, so whos to know?

[Jill]

At the conference here in Chicago this week, I've heard a few people with similar stories. In fact, the theory is that it can help get many deep pages indexed that were never indexed before.

More than one person has reported this, and these ain't stupid people!

Jill

[Haystack]

It seems like it would be in Google's best interest to index pages with Adsense code as quickly as possible so they can serve relevant ads and make a buck or two.

I haven't confirmed that it's the same robot from Google, but it sounds like Verster has.

[Vertster]

Haystack-

If its not the same bot, it would be hard to tell. It uses the same user agent, "Googlebot" to identify itself. I have not compared the actual IP addresses though.

Jill-

It appears that as soon as you put a page with adsense code online, it gets crawled. So it would stand to reason that if you had pages that Google was normally unable to find on its own, using adsense would help those get crawled. I have not been able to conclusively tie being crawled this way to being indexed though.

I agree its in Google's best interest to rapidly index these pages, but I have not found this to be the case. I launched a new site with adsense pages, and even though they were crawled immediately, it still took several weeks for them to appear in the index. However, if you have at least a couple inbound links to the domain, and are getting a regular fresh crawl, new pages appear within a couple days of going online whether or not they have adsense code.

[SearchRank]

We recently signed up for adsense for our Arizona Builders' Zone site which was just recently redesigned with many pages being moved. Of course we set up 301 permanent redirects so Google could find new pages and replace with old. However, everyone knows it usually takes a month or two for Google to assign any kind of page rank to new pages.

Our adsense ads went live a couple of days later all those pages had PR assigned to them!

So I would venture to say most definitely that it encourages spider crawling. This should not be a surprise seeing that they want to deliver relevant ads and in order to do so must know what the page is about. I think it is cool how for example I can have a page that lists Arizona Asbestos Removal companies and Google delivers ads about asbestos related companies.

[dragonlady7]

>AdSense used a different bot

I thought it did! I always heard it called "Media-Partners-Bot" or somesuch. So I had read that no, it was a different bot, and it didn't improve your ranking.

That said, I can see how spidering it for Adsense would encourage them to spider it for the regular index.

I'm astonished that I'm the only one who's heard that they're different bots, so I'm wondering if my fevered brain made that up.

I only started Adsense yesterday, so I will definitely have to check out my logs over the weekend and give them a good thorough analyzing. I'll let you know what I see.

[mcanerin]

Thanks Everyone!

I love this forum

I'll run it in a few places and see what happens.

I also occasionally use Ink to get a page spidered quickly, then after it's optimised I switch it to another page, and so on. I suspect that the same thing would happen with GBot, so you could use a temporary AdSense to get a page indexed quickly. Since G's goal is to index everything, I doubt they would penalize it in any way.

Just thinking out loud...

Ian

[Alan Perkins]

They are different robots. In fact, you can specifically disallow the Adsense robot from reading your content without preventing your site being indexed by Google, using robots.txt code like this:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* 
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot 
Disallow:

Google discovers URLs in lots of ways, and it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the Adsense bot effectively auto-submits a URL to the main Google index. But that doesn't (and shouldn't, IMO) mean that URL will be indexed any quicker or ranked any better.

I've been thinking this for a few weeks, but I will say it publicly today, 12 December 2003: IMO Adsense has the possibility to be the biggest PR disaster, the biggest can of worms that Google could possibly open, ever!

I'll say no more for now.

[peter_d]

Money
Serps
Money from Serps
Who needs PFI?
Collect as you go
They're doing the business

[powerofeyes]

IMO Adsense has the possibility to be the biggest PR disaster, the biggest can of worms that Google could possibly open, ever!

I am trying to sort out what you mean by that, absolutely confused :learn: . I am assuming vaguely Adsense is going to be some PR destroyer and my guessing is very bad,
Very eager to know what you mean since we run adsense in couple of sites,

I'll say no more for now. 

Did you say anything,

[Alan Perkins]

I am trying to sort out what you mean by that,   absolutely confused :learn: . I am assuming vaguely Adsense is going to be some PR destroyer and my guessing is very bad

Sorry, PR as in Public Relations - not PageRank.

I wasn't talking about Adsense harming you, I was talking about it harming Google.

Did you say anything

LOL

[sarahk]

My findings concur with Vertster and Jill.

The Google docs say the bot will be "Media-Partners-Bot" but...

my Botspotter results show that it was the standard GoogleBot/FreshBot that visits. I check on the name and the IP range and both match.

This isn't a problem particularly but I do have some affiliate pages which I block from Google indexing using the meta tags. I was thinking of relaxing that and using robots.txt to stop search engine indexing but allow "Media-Partners-Bot" and try to make some more $ from my affiliates.

[schecky]

Hmmm, I don't like this at all. I want to start using ads on a site and I don't think the advertisers are going to take kindly to Opera displaying ads for competitors. Google claims there is a "wall" between paid and algo search this makes me uneasy about those claims. I'm hoping it is a result of too much demand for mediapartnersbot to handle all the requests. I'll give Google the benefit of the doubt since past behavior warrants it, however, I am a little more skeptical about their claims then I was previous to seeing a few other posts similar to these.

If Googlebot is indexing my pages for the purpose of displaying ads for Opera browsers then I have no way to stop it, short of disallowing all bots from Google. I agree with Alan this has some real potential to become a PR disaster especially when so many think the recent algo change was about monetizing results and not improving results.

There is also some other new behavior that can be found if you look closely at the backlinks of Overture and Adwords advertisers such as bizrate, dealtime, and mySimon etal. Namely that some other changes to the indexing capabilities have enabled a lot more ads to be indexed. I'm not saying that is good or bad just that it is happening and gives advertisers in these programs some added pop because AdSense is contextual and being used on some sites with good PageRank. It also is a possible reason for ebay, bizrate and others being so prevalent in the results since they have been aggressively buying keywords for the past few months because of the christmas shopping season.

[SEOCub]

Opera displaying ads for competitors

Has that been rolled out? I don't see it on my version 7.11 yet.

...look closely at the backlinks of Overture and Adwords advertisers such as bizrate, dealtime, and mySimon etal. Namely that some other changes to the indexing capabilities have enabled a lot more ads to be indexed.

Huh? Overture and AdWords ads are showing as backlinks? I looked closely at the backlinks of the three you mentioned. I could not find any Overture or AdWords ads as backlinks. Can you point to one example?