Quick Adsense Tip #1: More Relevant Ads with Shorter Permalinks

16. Apr 2007 | 8 Comments

Quite a number of you have emailed me asking for some Quick Adsense Tips to go inline with the Adwords ones so why not!

I’m in the process of cleaning up my sidebar & putting more “clear defined” categories so this first tip ties in with that just nicely.

I find that with adsense if I use too strings in posts that are too long the Adsense ads can get quite a bit off target. I recently just used this plugin to migrate to shorter permalinks.

Originally I had the structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

However when using multiple categories the urls were becoming quite long & adsense was getting confused.

I’ve now migrated to merely:

/%postname%/

This has greatly increased the targeting of the Adsense ads & increased ctr by over 2% on some blogs.

Another handy feature of using the short permalinks is that I can now rearrange my whole sidebar & categories without making posts go 404 since the category name isn’t in the url anymore.

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8 Comments on "Quick Adsense Tip #1: More Relevant Ads with Shorter Permalinks"

Mark 17. Apr 2007, 1:51 am

Are you sure this increase wasn’t caused by Google’s new format adsense? I noticed an increase of 1-2% over all my sites recently and I haven’t changed anything.

Robert Irizarry 17. Apr 2007, 9:46 am

Great plugin! I just migrated from Blogger to Wordpress a couple of weeks ago and so retained the original permalink structure in order to make redirection less painful. Now that I’m there, this really opens up some great opportunities to optimize further. Thanks!

Stuart 17. Apr 2007, 11:32 am

The permalink migration was after the formatting change

moneymaker 17. Apr 2007, 12:04 pm

nice tip. thanks

Nate W. 17. Apr 2007, 5:52 pm

Also a great tip! Fixed it! Thanks!

Runa 18. Apr 2007, 8:20 pm

I normally use the following structure:

/%postname%/ – /%sitename%/

both in name and description, and it works very well, under the SEO point of view.

Schoo 22. Nov 2007, 5:22 am

More good tips. Thanks.

Huwey 07. Dec 2008, 3:11 am

Hi, I just want to say what a God send you’ve been, your advice is second to none. Your marketing skills are brilliant mate. Just a quick question as I’m new to all this, I’ve noticed in some of your posts you have: /%category%/%postname%/ as above. Is this some type of expired link of some sort? How do I go about seeing these? Cheers mate!!