SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

For those webmasters using Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network as a monetization model for their sites, getting kicked out of the program hurts their bottom line. While some are guilty of blatantly violating the terms of service, many who do their best to be legitimate don’t get any reason for getting banned from the contextaul ad program. This has led to unhappiness and sometime outrage from these webmasters.

Yahoo, in an effort to communicate better with their ad partners, added a compliance manager to YPN. According to the YPN blog:

If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days.

This is excellent news for advertisers and hopefully Google will follow suit.

Search Engine Watch has a post about the first documented case of being banned on Live.com for doing link exchanges.

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results. Please contact us once you’ve removed these links and we will reevaluate.

Google has manual site reviewers to prevent manipulation of the search index. Since majority of the traffic to a site comes from the first 30 results, there’s suspicion of a 30 position penalty.

To avoid any appearance of a reciprocal link exchange, you can perform three-way link exchanges. This, of course, requires you to have multiple sites to offer a link from. The best way to ensure against any possible future issues with link exchanges if you are still determined to do so, however, is to request RELATED links only. Thus a wedding site may request links from wedding photographers, caterers, limo services, etc. Getting link-backs from any website under the Sun is sure to hurt in the long run if it hasn’t already.

Here’s something Google Advertisers will find useful. Google Adwords offers a tool called Website Optimizer. With it, an advertiser can test conversions on different landing pages, headlines and ad copy. It then shows the testing results with graphs to help the advertiser choose the best ad combination for highest conversions.

From the Adwords blog:

help you find out which content will convert best on your site. Whether you define a conversion as a purchase or a newsletter sign-up, Website Optimizer allows you to experiment with different headlines, copy, and images on your site in order to find out which combination results in the most conversions. You can use this tool on your landing page or any page that represents a conversion.
At the end of each experiment, graphical reports show which version of your landing page users liked best, as measured by which variation had the highest conversion rate.

Experimenting with Website Optimizer on your landing page does not affect your Quality Score if you maintain the existing default landing page for the Ad Group.

You can sign up for their beta here.