Thoughts on optimizing sites, traffic, and revenues

March 09, 2004

Adsense & PageRank

Fred Wilson is a very well known VC in NYC, and runs a nice blog called 'A VC'. In commenting on his Google Ranking for his name he said: "Well, now I am at the top again. Go to Google. Check it out. And I am sure the reason why is that I put AdSense on my blog."

Sorry Fred, it just ain't so. Believe me there are hundreds if not thousands of folks out there aggressively experimenting with every trick in the book to juice their PageRank, and Adsense doesn't do it. I also run adsense on sites whose positions are scrupulously tracked. There's no impact. You can't believe that the smart folks at Google would bust down the 'chinese wall' between editorial and advertising in such an obvious way, do you?

It is much more reasonable to assume that your blogging increased both your PageRank and your relevance to the term 'Fred Wilson' because so many people now link to pages on your site using your name as the link text. The increase in relevance is probably more responsible for your improved position than any PageRank increase.

This is just one of the many PageRank rumours that live long unproductive lives. There are lots of sites, forums, and blogs that report on what works (even when they're wrong). Perhaps this site can take up the cause of exposing Google Snake Oil.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at March 9, 2004 10:43 PM
Comments

I was the original person who posted on Fred Wilson's site about AdSense in relation to page rank.

I knew Google page rank wasn't solely based on AdSense, but I wanted to see if anyone else had heard anything about it giving the slightest leverage to a site.

>
I've heard from search engine optimizers that adding AdSense to your page gives a bit of leverage when it comes to page rank.

Any merit to this?
<

I know incoming links, quality of links, and keyword integration are way more important things.

I just wanted to clear that up so it didn't sound like I was distributing any snake oil.

Posted by: Dhrumil at March 10, 2004 06:44 PM

According to Google, and on this count I believe them, there is no advantage give in the 'free' listings to anyone who either advertises (Adwords) or distributes (Adsense). In other words it has zero factor in the algorithm. In a nutshell: incoming links matter the most (both in point of origin and link text) and on page factors (title tags, body copy, HTML tags etc) also are of factors.

Hope that helps. - Craig

Posted by: Craig Danuloff at March 10, 2004 07:00 PM