One of the stories that recently grabbed my attention was an article on PlentyOfFish.com. This free dating site almost epithomises the internet business model of the future: user generated content made possible by online advertising. I say almost, because the site is not quite ‘2.0′. In fact, it is a very basic dating site, and is hardly more than a user forum. But it is free, and according to this article it could be worth a billion dollars (by today’s optimistic valuations). It’s revenue all comes from advertising, mainly Adsense.

Adsense (or content targeting on Adwords) has never really been the prime focus for most PPC marketers. On forums such as Webmasterworld people invariably report mixed results from content targeting (more so than from search). Common complaints are low CTRs, low ROIs and high levels of click fraud. Nevertheless, Google reportedly makes 40% of its revenue through this channel and it is now allowing advertisers to hand-pick the sites on which they want their ads to appear, rather than rely on Google contextual algorithms.

So for some people, contextual advertising is obviously worth their while. As an advertiser, why would you want to consider contextual targeting and would you want to hand-pick the sites you want to advertise on?

I would argue that Google generally does a good job at matching your ads to content. ‘Relevancy’ is the cornerstone of Google’s success (not to mention revenue) so they are motivated to make sure you get quality traffic. But Google is also fighting a continuous battle with fraudsters who are incentivised to defraud the system because they share in the Adsense revenue. Advertiser can now exclude sites from their content targeting if they find that the traffic originating from them is of questionable quality, but there can be so many of them that is costly and time-consuming to weed them out.

Site-targeting eliminates that problem because it is an ‘opt-in’ rather than an ‘opt-out’ approach. You can choose to only advertise on site you trust. The trick is still to identify the right sites and I think the PlentyofFish example demonstrates that nicely. Advertisers like the site because people on a dating site are inherently searching for something (in this case, love). This makes the site very different from for instance a site like facebook, which is more used for entertainment and social interaction. Understanding the mindset of visitors and targeting ’searching’ visitors is key to running a site targeted campaign. The problem with site-targeting though is that competition for premium sites will soar, as will advertising costs.

But given the dynamics of the web there will be not be a shortage of new content and new customers anytime soon. All the more reason to get more familiar with contextual advertising.

One of the recurring tasks of the ongoing work of running a website is managing your 404 Errors. And a rather important task this is too, because it does tell the search engines how well looked after a site is.

On Google, you can use the “site:” operator to find all your site URLs in their index -

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.africanpridehotels.com

however, it does not show you which URLs are broken. Yahoo! have taken this one step further by allowing you to do the following, using the same operator:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.africanpridehotels.com

What Yahoo! provides you with here is a TSV list of your pages in their index and more importantly, they list the pages that are not found at the bottom of that list - therefore your latest list of 404 URLs that need your attention!

This list of URLs can be added to your .htaccess file with rules for 301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary) Redirection and that way you ensure the that your site audience, including crawlers, spiders and bots are able to find ALL of your content!

Thanks to Yahoo! for providing a full list in a standardized & downloadable format.