Don't cry foul! Be smarter with Google's Adsense Smart Pricing.

You can't blame Google for wanting to do right by their merchants, and try to get them the best qualified traffic possible. Google's attempt to deal with the arbitrage issue has caused some problems for their legit publishers as well.

I'm talking about Adsense Smart Pricing, which was Google's original answer to dealing with arbitrage junk-clicks. It's definitely having an effect in favor of the merchants, but guess what … it's got a wicked backlash to it that is hurting those White Hat Publishers as well. Opps!

The problem is that there are poor quality advertisers/merchants out there as well. And if your site happens to run in the same keyword set that those poor quality advertisers do, then you've got problems my friend.

What happens is the the consumer comes to your site, clicks the Google ad and lands on the crappy advertisers landing page … the consumer then bails on that crappy site immediately.

What's that mean for you? Means Google is going to punish you for sending that advertiser what they percieve as bad traffic, when you were not at fault at all. Oops! 

So, there is something you can do combat the evils of the bad advertiser syndrome.

Log into your AdSense account and then wander on over to the Adsense Setup area … look for the Competitive Ad Filter and click on to it. In the box of URLs to block, paste in a copy of this list of Bad Advertisers to be Blocked.

Do this and you'll made a big dent in the amount consumers fleeing from your Google links. Life will be good again!

There's a lot of chatter around the Net right now about the letters that Google is sending out to some of their AdSense publishers. The keywords here is "some" are getting them, while others are not.

I personally don't practice artbitrage, although I get it, clearly I can't speak from experience. What I'd rather do is point you in the direction of a few quality postings on the topic and let you get yourself educated.

Post to read are:
http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/05/19/adsense-arbitrage-just-the-facts/
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2007/05/google_adsense_16.html

That's it. You won't learn what arbitrage is, but if you're practicing it … get straight on what's going on.

1: Accessibility

Search engines must be able to access your web pages. If search engines cannot parse your web pages, then they will ignore your site and you won't get good rankings.

Make sure that your web server does not return any error codes when search engine spiders visit your web pages. If your server returns an error code, search engines will not index your site.

The correct code should be "200 OK". You can check the status code that your web server returns to search engines with IBP's search engine spider simulator (free).

In addition, make sure that the HTML code of your web pages does not contain errors that prevent search engines from indexing your site.  The content of your web pages must make sense to search engines. Do not use images or Flash to present the main content of your web pages.

2: Site and information architecture

Your web site should have a good site architecture to make sure that it is not just a collection of random web pages. The pages of your web site should be related by topic and they should show search engines that your web site is relevant to a one topic or niche.

This is very important because most major search engines seem to use latent semantic indexing in their ranking algorithms.

3: Keywords choice

Choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps that determines whether your SEO efforts are successful or not. Consider hiring an SEO Writer.

It's best to focus on 2 or 3 word keywords for search engine optimization. One word keywords are less likely to convert to a sale, and they are also much more competitive. So, focus on keyword clusters of two and three keywords together.

4: Content

Web sites that only offer articles and affiliate/AdSense links that can be found on dozens of other web sites will have a harder time getting search engine rankings.

Try to create unique and trustworthy content that separates your web site from the others. Write — and write more — unique content for your web site to make sure that your web site becomes the best resource of information for that topic/niche.

5: Inbound links

Without good inbound links, it is impossible to get high rankings on major search engines. You should get as many links as possible from related web sites. The more targeted and relevant the link, the more it will help your search engine rankings.