If you have AdSense on your site then you want people to click your ads, right? That’s how you make money. So you think to yourself, “I need good content about X so that I can reach number one in Google. Then I’ll have lots of people click to my page and then they will click my ads. I’ll be rich!“
Um… no.
If you’re lucky, your great page will get you links, and you will get to the top of Google for your query, and you will get tons of traffic… but Ad revenue?
No.
The problem is that if your page has perfectly satisfied what the user was looking for then they do not need to click your ads! Its only if your article is tangentially related to what the user wanted, or if your page is out-right crappy and uninformative, that the user will need to click past your page.
Sure, there are cases where if you are searching for a Review of X, then an ad to buy X may get clicked based on your informative review. But the unfortunate truth is that this is the exception, not the rule.
Crap… so the best way to make money of ads is by ranking in Google for spammy pages?
Afraid so. Even more frightening — the only way Google can make money is by sending users to crappy pages where they need to click through to good ads. As the owner of a site that relies heavily on traffic obtained by CPC ads, I can deal with this! I need traffic, and Google sends me oodles (for a price), but as a searcher I am concerned.
To read about how Google is willing to compromise search to maximise the ad-revenue read SEObook’s Excuse me, but where did Google’s organic search results go? and check out the image below. Frightening.
Where did Google's organic results go?
