Subtle Ad Linking At Sudoku Links

25.6 Subtle Ad Linking At Sudoku Links

Fig. 25.6 Columns of ads at SudokuLinks.com...

You have to look hard to spot the ads at SudokuLinks.com. The entire site consists of a series of vertical columns, filled with links. One of those columns is a vertical AdSense column which is placed in the middle of the page, not at the side where it would be ignored.

This is certainly a striking example of one way to blend an ad unit into a Web page but I doubt it’s going to work for everyone. You might be able to follow this strategy on a Resources or Links page on your website but clearly the biggest problem is the lack of content.

The only content on the page consists of a small column right beneath the ad unit explaining how to play Sudoku.

That could be the sort of thing that drives down click value; Google prefers sites with lots of content rather than pages that contain nothing but links.

But you could still use this strategy on a site with dynamic content by, for example, placing teasers to articles in vertical or horizontal columns, that match the AdSense unit. And you could make those content columns more obvious than pushing them to the bottom of the page.

In general though, this looks like an extremely effective strategy. If you can make it work for you, you should see some great results.

Fig. 25.7 ...but not too much content.