Hey, Shouters! First of all, I would like to thank Harsh & ShoutMeLoud (SML) for giving me this exciting opportunity to share my experience here. I’ve been a reader of ShoutMeLoud from past few months & SML taught me a lot regarding blogging, SEO, internet marketing, etc. So, Thanks, Harsh & SML for making this beautiful & awesome blogging community. Now, let’s start with our main topic.
Google India Publisher meet Was in Four Season’s Hotel, Mumbai on 27’th February 2015 where we got the chance to personally meet the people working behind the scenes of Google Search, AdSense. I’m not going to share the every detail of the meet but the important things that we, the bloggers should focus on. The meet started with a cup of coffee.
The first session was by Mr. Ashish Kalsi, who is working as a Search Quality Analyst at Google Search Team. He showed the Digital Landscape in India. Since India is rapidly growing digitally, we all have the great opportunity here. His main focus was on the SEO side of the site.
Takeaway from Google Search Session:
- Mobile, Multiscreen site:Since we know that the mobile market is increasing day by day, its very important to make your website mobile friendly. Google always recommends us to use theresponsive web design but if you aren’t and if you have the separate subdomain like m.yoursitename for mobile, then just make sure that redirection that you have is working properly and added rel=“canonical” to tell Googlebot that your mobile and main site are the same.
- Not necessary to work on robots.txt
It’s 2015, and Google search is getting better with time. It crawls and indexes your sites automatically. You don’t need to add it separately unless you don’t want Google or any other bots to stop crawling particular section of your site.
- Use of custom 404 page
No matter what tools are you using for your site creation but don’t show those ugly and black and white ‘Not Found’ pages. You can show something like related links/ posts for the search query. If you are on WordPress, then there are many custom plugins that will help you out. Or you can directly edit the 404 template from appearance. That will increase user engagement and help in decreasing bounce rate.
- URL Structure & image name
You should look at your URL structure because this mainly helps search engines to decide the relevancy of your websites to the keywords. Very big sites are not aware of this still now. E.g. if you are writing a post about balloons and inserted red and green balloon pictures then you can rename your images as red_balloon, green_balloon, etc. instead of ‘IMG_20140823_134828’ or ‘pic12322.’
- Structured Markup
You can use the data highlighter tool in your Google Webmaster tools to markup data on the website. Now days, In SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) if you search for the events then you will also see the event dates, time and venue. Also, if you search for the recipes, you’ll also see the star ratings directly in the search result. Hence, you should use the features of the rich snippets which are suitable for you. You can find more info about it on the schema.org
- Make it fast
No one likes slow website. Users expect to load website within a second on standard 3G network speed. Though we can’t achieve that but still, we can get closer. Google highly recommends the use of Pagespeed insights tool to make your site load faster. Also, I recently observed the red ‘slow’ label in the SERPs in front of each result on mobile. If you are on WordPress then you can use the plugins like WP Super Cacheto make your site load faster. Also, you can use EWWW image optimizer plugin to compress your images automatically.
TakeAway from Google AdSense Publisher Session
- Use of bigger ad formats.
Google recommends the use of bigger ads sizes like 336×280 large rectangles. The bigger ads give higher CTR (Click Through Rate)
- No Adult Content
If you are using AdSense then using any adult content on your website/ blog is not permissible. It may result in it direct account ban. Just make sure your blog has family safe content. The video given below explains everything in simple & better way.
- Experiment
1 ad format may not suit all. That’s why there are many different sizes, styles out there for ads. Utilize those. Do A/B testing. And find out what works for you and what not!
- No copied content
One person asks in meet that if he makes the site which will automatically fetch the feeds from other major sites and display those only then will it violate AdSense policy? The answer is YES! Since he is not adding any value in the content, it will be termed as copied content only. Also, in terms of rankings, Google will definitely penalize him.
- Position neatly
Read the ads position guidelines of AdSense carefully. If you put the ads below/ above images, then it’s not allowed. If you are placing ads in the sidebar in widget, then use onlyAdvertisements, or Sponsored links labelling are allowed other than don’t give any. If you violate the policy then immediately you may see the violation notice in your AdSense dashboard. You have three days to fix it. If you don’t, then there will be account ban
- Account banned? Here are the chances by which you may get it back
I’ve purposefully written ‘may’ because the chances of re-initiation are solely depended upon the level of violations done by the publisher. If you’ve done too much then better to change your base. But if you think that it’s little then make sure you analyse it from start. Google first looks at the business model of the site. Intent of ads. Then only takes the final decision.
In their initiation appeal form, write everything in details. Get the visitors details from the cPanel and if you found any suspicious ones then simply add them in the appeal. As long as you, yourself are not doing anything wrong then you don’t need to worry. But prevention is always better than cure.
So these were few useful points that I think you should know if you are/ going to be AdSense publisher. I purposefully neglected things like invalid clicks/ impressionssince you know them.
And this is my (Guy at the left), with my friend Nikhil Bhuktar. (Right)
I hope the takeaway from Google Publisher meet helped you in a way. If you get a chance to attend one such event, I recommend you to attend it. Such events always add a lot of values & it’s always good to hear directly from the company we are indirectly working for.
If you ever attended any similar meet, I would love to hear your experience & takeaway in the comment section below. Do share this article with others, as it would help them to learn something new.
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