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Last May 9, I read about Adsense Smartpricing in Griz’s make money online blog. One of the top make money online blogs that is truly worth considering. It offers very very relevant and informative information (duh..) which is not what you will see in other make money online gurus out there (the A-listers…).

As usual Griz, wrote very very very long posts but which I thoroughly read (I read all his posts thoroughly…). In a nutshell, what he was saying was if your site is not a niche site and not laser-targeted in its topic then most likely any quest to earn Adsense from that site would ultimately get smartpriced. After reading that, it got me worried with this blog. As you can see it contains Adsense ads to help pay for itself (in terms of hosting and domain..). This is a personal blog which talks about everything and anything under the sun and basing from Griz’s post, my site is to be smartpriced sooner or later. And not just my site but also my other sites because smartpricing is not at the site level, but at the account level.

Griz also said that social traffic is bad for Adsense. This is because visitors coming from social sites are not in the mood to click ads but to just browse around. Or if they do click, it is just out of curiosity and the probability of the them buying is slim. Granted, this is not always true. But there is wisdom in his words. Social traffic normally tend to just browse around and surf. And if your goal is to earn money online, then social traffic is not the sort of traffic you would be going after. Now what does this have to do with Adsense smartpricing?

Well, Griz theory is that since social traffic generally is not there to buy and on the event that they do click the ads and go to the advertisers sales page, they would just simply leave since they are not there to buy. This is bad for the advertiser since it cost them a click which did not result in a sale. This is bad for Google because this implies that their system does not work. And to solve this problem, Google introduced smartpricing which will give you a prorated CPC (cost per click) depending on the quality of the click. That means if an ad-clicker clicks and buys, then most probably, you won’t get smartpriced. If an ad-clicker clicks and does not buy and this happens many and most of the time, then you will get smartpriced. Well, this is just a theory anyway but well worth taking into consideration.

So on the very same day, I checked my earnings. I did see some $0.01 to $0.10 clicks and assumed I was smartpriced. On the other hand I still do have $1-$3 clicks. But still I assumed I was smartpriced. I cannot afford to turn off Adsense for a week or two (minimum amount of time to get desmartpriced…) so I looked for WP plugins that would only show my Adsense ads to search engine visitors. This was good. However, there was a problem. If an SE visitor enters my site, then the plugin would take care of showing the ads. But what if this SE visitor click on links to my other posts, will the plugin still consider the SE visitor an SE visitor? Sadly, no. This would mean that ads would have less views and thus less chances of being clicked thus my low May 2009 earnings.

Come June 6 2009 and I turned the plugin off. Back then, I wanted to see if I would still get those dreaded $0.01 clicks after 2-3 weeks of showing ads only to SE visitors. To my utter surprise, I still did see $0.01 clicks! But then again, I still also saw those $1-$3 clicks. So what’s up with that? Am I still smartpriced? I did some more research on the quality and topics of my posts. Then I came to the conclusion that I was not even smartpriced from the very beginning! I noticed that my posts that had $0.01 clicks came from posts that were tied to gaming. And as we all know such niches pay poorly. That means those $0.01 click were legitimate clicks and I earned what I deserved. Those clicks probably were just worth $0.05 to $0.10 to Google (I only earn a portion of what Google earns…) that’s why I only get $0.01.

So what have I learned from this? Smartpricing is real as can be seen from other people’s reports. But we do not have to get scared of it causing us to abandon our Adsense earning altogether by pulling them out. As one of the veterans I have talked about this said, we just have to make sure that most of our visitors come from the SE and not social traffic (90% above would do…).

This is also points out that onpage SEO is as important as offpage SEO. Never neglect onpage SEO reasoning that offpage SEO (backlinking…) is only what’s important. Creating a neat site (good HTML, CSS coding) for the SE robots and following the onpage SEO guidelines showing ‘respect’ to them is certainly important. It might have been that those sites that got smartpriced and blaming that their being smartpriced is due to their site not being a niche site were probably smartpriced because their code was cluttered thus the Google bots were not able to identify what their site is all about thus causing to show irrelevant ads thus causing low quality clicks thus causing being smartpriced.

The bottom line is this, Google is smart. We won’t know their algorithms fully and all we can do is guess. But like in real life, if we show respect to someone, more likely than not that someone would also show respect to us. So, respect Google and its bots and hope that the big G won’t smartprice you.

Make sure to check out the site for more related information about Adsense Smartpricing Experiment .

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