I think text-link-ads will have to find a new business model soon. It appears that Google is taking the issue of paid links very seriously and according to this Matt Cutts article, you can now report paid links appearing on a Webpage!

In another post, Matt Cutts talks about the disclosures required if you are going to place a paid link. Basically provide a machine readable disclosure (rel=nofollow) and a human readable disclosure.

As you can guess from my previous articles, I am a strong advocate of rel=nofollow. As a leader of search engines, Google has the responsibility to clean up the paid link menace in its early stage itself. This is the only way to ensure integrity of search index.

The explosion in online advertising and the huge interest generated by blogs have begun to pollute the search results of google and other search engines. In fact “how to make money online” seems to be the most searched term these days. I am not against “making money online”, infact I am trying to atleast cover my hosting expenses via Adsense! But I think search engines should strive for achieving this simple statement - “Content is the King”.

It is a shame that other search engines doesn’t support rel=nofollow. 

First of all, I am sorry if the title was insulting. But I couldn’t find a better title than it for what I am going to say!

Some of you would have already noticed the presence of Google Adsense on this blog. The primary aim of this blog is not to make money, but at the same time I hoped that it would atleast cover my hosting expenses ($100 a year).

Now here is the interesting part. This blog is completing 2 months this week. So far I had around 1800 page views as you can see from the following Google Analytics report. I know, it is pretty low compared to A-list blogs, but still I was expecting some earnings from these impressions.

Next let us look at my Google Adsense earnings from this site. There is no surprise there! - It is a total of $0.00!

Now frankly this is very discouraging. But I know adsense does work. As you can see, guys like John Chow (a nasty guy who would probably bring down the whole internet!) and Amit Agarwal does make sacks of dollar notes every month. So what is the reason why I am not getting any adsense revenue?

I did a bit of research and I think there are mainly two reasons for this,

1. I don’t have enough ad units on the page. Some think that having less ads gives more money. In my blog, I don’t think it works!

2. The most important reason I think is that most of my blog readers are intelligent. Even those who come to this site via Google search are pretty intelligent. I guessed it from what my readers are searching to reach this blog.

So in order to get more advertising money, I need to gather an audience which is less intelligent. If I could get an army of idiots coming to this site, I am sure my adsense income will skyrocket!

I think the easiest way to do that would be to write about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and American Idol. Don’t worry I have no such plans, yet.

Last week I signed up to Google Adwords which allows me to advertise my site on Google partner sites using Adsense. I started a new campaign to see how the whole thing works. The whole setup process takes only 10 minutes and all you need is a credit card.

Initially, you start with a “basic” account which simplifies ad creation process. Being a geek, I immediately upgraded it to “Standard Edition”. This offers a huge set of options  such as content targeting, site targeting, geographic targeting etc. It will take sometime before you are familiar with the set available options. 

When I tried to add my first ad, I came across a problem. My idea was to promote my blog as the “best blog from India”. But unfortunately Adwords doesn’t allow putting superlatives such as “Best”! Here is the error I got,

This seems funny since any ad served by Adsense is clearly marked as “Ads by Google”. So why can’t call my blog the “best blog from India”?

After correcting the error, I released my first ad to the internet world. In a day, Google served over 10,000 impressions of my ad! I got around 80 visitors through the campaign. But all of this comes at a cost, and hence I paused my campaign for the time being

But this confirms one thing. If you have a ecommerce site, advertising using Adsense will get you a lot of new customers and business.