adsenseLane

While Adsense is a GREAT way to get income on your websites a recent post about how Adsense crawls your site reminded me about some issues that some might face when optimizing a site that uses Adsense.

The biggest thing is that you have to make sure that your site doesn’t have any blocks to the Adsense crawlers. This can come in a few forms

• First is the robots.txt - This is a little text file that helps web site crawlers find out more about your website and how to crawl it. It’s critical that you don’t have anything blocked. You can find a bit more about the robots.txt file at this site.
• Authentication or Logins - Sometimes your site may be passworded. I usually check the site by closing my browser, clearing my temporary files or cache and even get rid of any cookies. This ensures that not only can visitors to my site won’t be left out in the cold but the Adsense crawler will get to my content and serve the correct ads.
• Finally sessions and cookies - these are a bit more subtle and if you’re not sure if they are a problem you’re probably not going to have a problem. Using the clear cache/delete cookie method should be enough to find out if there is an issue.

Finally with any website take a quick look and see if your site is available for others to view by visiting your site right after you’ve published it. Not only will this let you see your handiwork it will let you know if there is a problem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Outside Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.