Hi all, This is a tricky issue for me, although perhaps quite clear cut to you, my blog started as a typical blog where I just write about anything I want to, but I became an Adsense publisher so I could pay for my hosting costs, and now traffic is increasing and I notice that the pages that get the Adsense clicks are the ones about blogging/theming etc. My other pages on topics that interest me get good traffic but never seem to make any difference to the Adsense click rate. My question is this, if I remove the other topics and put them into their own blog, will this hurt or benefit my Adsense? Secondly, I don't think I can use a redirect from the pages I move, so I will probably lose that traffic. What would you do? Should I just take it like a man and chalk it up to experience, or should I try something else?
Just leave them in there. Continue blogging as you have been. Perhaps concentrate new posts on topics that bring you more ad revenue.
As BILZ said -- leave the pages that doesn't seem to perform alone, but just start focusing more on the topics that do pay. This way, you can continue to write about topics of interest to you, while doing likewise for topics that will pay you. It's win-win.
Ok, good advice, because the site is a blog, the front page always gets the latest entries regardless of topic, should I keep my other topics off the front page so the adsense stays topical, and then maybe put a snippet in the sidebar to the latest posts from those other topics - would that work, or would it do the same thing?
Hmm, you may not want to alienate the rest of your visitors. As you said, your non-blog entries are popular, it's just that no one clicks, right? So what you can do is keep the front page as is, but just highlight the blogging entries with, as you said, an additional "Look here! Blogging Entries!" (something like that) box/etc. listing all the recent blogging entries. Put it at the very top of the sidebar where it can be easily seen, and I think that would do it. Remember, just because the visitors for your other entries aren't clicking, it doesn't mean they won't start clicking. Are your ads relevant for those other entries?
The other pages seem to have relevant ad's but now and again I notice non-relevant ad's. I don't mind the non-relevant ads usually, but then again on a page about a little island in the middle of the mediterranean I don't expect to see blog ads. Should I rewrite some of those pages so the ad's become more relevant, or should I add a few more pages in thos categories but just keep them off the front page. If I write/rewrite pages to be more adsense targetted (but also still interesting to the reader) would this be against the TOS?
You can edit your blog entries as many times as you want, Adsense really doesn't care. Yeah, the blog ads are probably dominanting because that's the ad category Google falls back on when it can't find, or hasn't fully read that page yet. It's my theory that when Google first encounters your page, it reads what's on it, and assigns you an initial category. In-between the time it returns to "sense" your new pages, it sends you generic ads from that category it assigned you -- in your case, blog ads. It's only when Adsense visits your site regularly, like every hour, that it starts sending more relevant, up-to-the-published ads. This is why it's always a good idea when you first start blogging to choose a narrow, focused subject and stick with it. Blogs that talk about everything always has this problem. It just can't be helped. The only thing I can recommend is give it time and patience, and it should right itself. Others may be able to chime in with other "hints" to force relevant ads...