Hi all, when createing a new ad, you can select the them (category). I was wondering if this information is used somehow in the algorithm. Do sites within the same theme link to each other? If so, that would be of course very beneficial for all of us, as the backlinks would come from related and relevant sites. However, there are only very few themes there (for eaxmple there isn't even e-commerce category!). I would guess that there is a very significant portion of sites, which don't fall under any of those categories. I have 3 sites in the network, and none of them belongs to any of the themes. Therefore I am using the "Other" theme, which gives me 100% backlinks from totally unrelated websites. I am a bit worried about having all my backlinks from unrelated sources, as far as I know Google (and the other SE will probably follow) is moving towards evaluating the backlinks for their content and keyword relevancy to te website. So my request it - would it be possible to add more themes to choose from? If we could choose from a list like for example templatemonster . com has (check the category dropdown on homepage), that would be great. Thanks!
It's not used yet, just for data collecting purposes. Once the network is big enough, so all sites will get enough separate links from within their chosen theme, then it's ready to be implemented. You may suggest categories in the forum. But too many categories might give you higher relevancy but it will significantly lower the number of link sources hence not distributing your ads as widely as you were hoping for. I'd rather have my ads on 2000 somewhat related pages than on 10 highly related pages.
Well... I'd rather have 1 ad on each of those 10 related sites and then 1 ad on 1990 other sites. Whereas right now, there is no benefit from specifying the category at all. You can simply implement the algorithm in a way, that the related sites would have higher priority for displaying the ads. Say there are 10 related sites and 2000 unrelated ones. The ads would be shown on related sites first, and if there is enough of them, then they should be shown on the other (unrelated) ones. You can implement it right now, without waiting to have more sites in each category. IF the ads are related, THEN show them. ELSE, if there isn't enough ads in related category, THEN show whatever other ads. I think this would be a major improvement and everybody would benefit. We would give a lot better push to each other if the ads were related to the site. Remember Florida update? Looks like all major SE are going in that direction, and we should be ready when they change their algorithms... Why wait, if we all can benefit from it right now?
Oh - and one more suggestion: The more categories, the better! You can always have some conditions set that IF there isn't enough ads in that category, THEN display ads from other categories. And bringing it even further - we should be able to choose more than one category, and there should also be a priority in the categories. For example you have an e-commerce site selling women cloting. If you have 100 categories to chose from, you can select: 1. clothing 2. fashion & beauty 3. e-commerce (more general category) The algorithm would first select the ads in category 1., then 2., then 3. and if there still wouldn't be enough, it would take any other random ones from other categories. Easy, quick, huge benefit for all
As far as it stands, there isn't any plan to choose ads at this point - the plan is to wait until the network gets bigger.
I don't know how much information can you reveal, but... how many users do you have at the moment? Or how many active accounts are in the network?