PubCon Recap Day 2: YPN Ad Targeting Tips and More

Day two of PubCon was quite entertaining. The speakers kept me entertained the most, as most of the content was review for me. My favorite moment was when ContextWeb VP Jay Sears started bashing Google's Adsense program for being slow to crawl a page. He kept saying their technology could determine the context of a page in 20 nanoseconds. He then went on to demonstrate this by running a web-based backend query tool from ContextWeb that returned XML version of the context of any URL. He would click the button and about a second later the XML would return and he would blurt out "See... see... that was about 20 nanoseconds!". Funny thing was... he was being serious... ;-) I'm interested in getting one of those nanosecond stop watchs he must have been using. I did note the Google Adsense rep give a slight smile while he was doing this... Very entertaining.

But I did take away a few interesting tidbits. I'll highlight them below:

1. How to Improve YPN Ad Targeting - Cody Simms from Yahoo gave a nice overview on things that the YPN crawler might look for when trying to determine the context of the page, and hence what ads to show. Some points worth noting:

• Try to integrate keywords into the URL. YPN likes that.
• Be sure to use strong anchor text keywords on pages that LINK TO the page with the ad in question.
• Description text that immediately follows these links is also looked at to help determine context.
• For homepage, if you page does not change very often, try sprinkling some dynamic elements on the page to help wake up the YPN crawler to re-visit your page.
• For pages that are constantly changing, try using their category targeting.
• If you are specifying meta keywords for a page, make sure they are also used in the content of that page. Otherwise it is considered spammy.

2. Google Adsense Recommends Enabling Video/Image Ads - Apparently their inventory is rising for these types of ads. They predict it will only continue to rise and publishers who have these type of ads disabled may be missing out on revenue.

3. Google's New Video Revenue Sharing Program - Google is working on a revenue sharing model that will allow users who embed media like videos from YouTube, etc on their site to earn a percentage of any ads that are shown before or during the video. I think this is an awesome feature and look forward to hearing more about it.

4. Google and Yahoo on NOFOLLOW - A question was asked by an audience member about the use of NOFOLLOW to instruct the search engine crawler to not index the destination page of their own site (internal link). They wanted to use it to help tell the crawler that certain pages were duplicate content and to ignore them. Both Google and YPN reiterated that NOFOLLOW should only be used to say the link is NOT ENDORSED and could be potentially spammy. Don't try to use it for any other reasons.

That's it for now! I'll do one last follow-up post tomorrow if I can. Off to the free continental breakfast... =)