Influencing Google for Web Site Promotion and Adsense Revenue

© May 2019 Anthony Lawrence
December 2005

There really isn't much you can do directly with Google in the area of web site promotion. However, there are a few tools you can use. The newest is a set of comment tags that may help Google identify the "real" content of your site. The idea is that you avoid sidebars and any other boiler plate content that may contain words potentially confusing to Google's analysis. The tags are:

<!- google_ad_section_start ->
<!-google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ->
<!- google_ad_section_end ->
 

I suppose this is better than nothing, and could help in some places. The "ad_section" wording suggests that they are only using these to determine Adsense content, but I don't know why their search indexing spiders wouldn't pay some attention to that also.

I do wish Google would add to this to include at least a "not about" property. I realize that Google isn't going to let anyone tell them what a page IS about, but a "not about" property can't really be abused as easily and could help their accuracy in search results.

If they are worried about cheaters, they could put a bounty out for such sites. If someone is abusing Google (Adsense or search) by stuffing keywords or deceptive use of tags, offer the bounty hunter that site's Adsense income for the month. That would sniff this kind of scum out.

For the search and indexing side of things, Google now lets web sites submit an xml file that lists urls and some information about how often the pages change, and how important the page is relative to other pages. Basically, it gets you to do part of the work for them - which we would hope helps everyone.

Google provides a Python script that can produce the file for your site; I wrote a Perl script that does the same:

#!/usr/bin/perl
chdir("/yourhtdocs");
@stuff=`find . -type f -name "*.html"`;
open(O,">sitemap");
print O <<EOF;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
EOF
foreach (@stuff) {
 chomp;
 s/^..//;
$rfile="/yourhtdocs/$_";
($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,$atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks)=stat $rfile;
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst)=localtime($mtime);
$year +=1900;
$mon++;
$mod=sprintf("%0.4d-%0.2d-%0.2dT%0.2d:%0.2d:%0.2d+00:00",$year,$mon,$mday,$hour,$min,$sec);
$freq="monthly";
$freq="daily" if /index.html/;
$priority="0.5";
$priority="1.0" if /index.html/;
 
print O <<EOF;
<url>
      <loc>https://yoursite/$_</loc>

      <lastmod>$mod</lastmod>
      <changefreq>$freq</changefreq>
      <priority>$priority</priority>
   </url>

EOF
}
print O <<EOF;
</urlset>
EOF
close O;
unlink("sitemap.gz");
system("gzip sitemap");
 

By the way, that chunk of Perl looks like something Google should ignore - so I added those tags around it.

Season to taste.. see https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

Got something to add? Send me email.

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