Greetings, Just wanted to test a theory... We have our adsense ads being controlled through SSI. We can easily get the user agent in this case... I am thinking for bots (slurps, ichiro, etc...) of not showing ads. Does anyone think this would be a good idea? My concern is - are we wasting value ad impressions on spiders? I am not so concerned about SEO. Thanks.
Well.. since adsense works through javascript and most (all?) bots do not use javascript the ads are not called for bots. So for a bot hit you will not get an adsense impression. But if you leave the adsense code in the page when it ends up in the search engine cache the ads will still be shown when someone views the cached copy. Ross
It's not impression based so that's not an issue. My guess is Google doesn't count spider click thru's as real clicks either. I bet they record the useragents themselves already and base the stats on that premise. I don't think you should be worried about this. Let Google do their job.
Spiders never click on the adsense ads as they are all based on javascript and spiders dont use javascript. If you look at the adsense code there are no links to follow until the javascript is run on the client. Ross
Google reads javascript. Wouldn't be surprised if others do as well. PS Thanks for the empty negative feedback for my earlier post in this thread...
Spiders are basically programs that read a copy of your web page and evaluate the content of the page itself. I would think it would be a rare exception for a spider to actually read in a javascript include, and even if it did, Google's code in the javascript include probably checks for a browser existance, allowing it to ignore non-browser requests like a spider. This is of course just my opinion...;-)
Are you sure? I dont have any hits on my javascript files by googlebot. I have read that the Googlebot/Test agent reads javascript tho. Who are you talking about? Me? I didn't give any negative feedback. Ross