Hi, Just joined Adsense for content and search. Am just a little sceptical if the ads displayed will take my visitors away to a competitors website thus harming me more than it's benefit. Also can I do some ting that ad links open in a new window rather than same. Pl help. My site is a travel website providing information and bookings for resorts and hotels in India. R.Anand
You can filter your competitors ads. Its always good to keep an eye on the ads displayed, and remove unwanted ads. Check out adsense help to findout how to filter ads. Again, if the user is very important to you, i would suggest not to put up ads.
For commercial sites, the short answer would be yes. Stay away from any form of advertising when you are selling products... it just leaves a door wide open for people to leave your site and buy from your competitors. After all a sale of a few dollars is much better than a few cents from a ad.
I've tried HotelClub affiliate for about 1 month and never get any sales. They are paying for every booking, not every click. Seems like too much for a $5 commission. So I removed the affiliate stuff from my websites, just AdSense now
You may not open the links in a new windows, that is against Adsense policies. https://www.google.com/adsense/policies
In your situation, I would not run adsense on my home page for sure, but adsense for search might be okay. However, I personally have not seen great results with the search - but, depending on your site, it would be better than having none. Further, with the adsense search, you can have the default search be your page, and then if they don't find what they're looking for the may opt to do a www search which is merely offering them a service IMO; the search results you can have open in a new page - it's part of the options you setup if you select it. If you have secondary pages that are more informative than sales, AdSense for content may be okay and not detract from your own potential sales. It'll be a judgement call. I would suggest setting up individual channels for each page (you're allowed up to 200 now) and gauge the efficacy of the adsense program in that manner.
I will like to add here that I am from India and my information is also about India, 99% of my clients are from India too while the website is seen in more than 60 countries. Also I have seen most of the ads are from foriegn based travel agents with whom I am otherwise also not competing, that's why I have joined Adsense as an experiment, let's see if it works. Now I want suggestions how to see whether using Adsense is doing me harm. Anand