Examples Of Adsense Font Size – Small, Medium & Large
Google has just added a new feature to Adsense – publishers may now choose the size of the font they wish to display.
This change will be welcomed by Adsense publishers small and large, near and far.
The crux of this change is that it allows publishers to create more unique looking ad units than have previously been available – while also attracting more attention to ads simply by making the text bigger.
To the right I have examples of the new Adsense font size configurations:
What I have noticed with my limited testing is that different ad blocks seem to be affected in different ways by the font size settings.
468×60 adsense blocks appeared not to be affected at all…
I found the 728×90 to be quite effective and am running a test on our Forum – have a look here.
The 728 leaderborad seems to work well with the new large font setting because it now always shows 3 large ads side by side. Previously you would get 3 or 4 ads, but most often 4.
I have also tested a 338×280 block set to large on leftover ham recipes. I don’t feel this really works as the ad prior to this fitted perfectly – now it looks cluttered. I will run this for a few days and see what click through rate it delivers.
I think this new feature from Google will definitely allow publishers to optimize ad placements and generate more adsense revenue, however my testing so far indicates that some testing and tweaking of ad formats is needed as the new options provide very different looking ads that may no longer work with your site aesthetics.
I’m keen to test out more ad blocks/sizes with different adsense font size settings and will report back on my findings.
Let me know in the comments if you have found an ad size/font size that works well for you. Leave a link to your site too!
2009, Year Of The JoomlaBear
A few quick updates.
I’ve dropped the adsense from the blog feed – It was pretty annoying and I wondered why people would subscribe and then leave again within a few days – I subscribed to my own feed a few days ago and noticed how the format appears to be just a few lines of text and then an annoying ad… I actually had forgotten I’d activated ads for the feed… It sort of just happened while I was playing around with my adsense account before Xmas.
You only get a partial feed at present but I know I can give you guys the full post in your feed reader. If this would this be preferable then leave me a comment saying so.
When I set up this blog initially I raced through the options without thinking to much – but have since found that I absolutely love blogging, and an audience seems to be developing with traffic increasing by the day. So I’m keen now to tailor the site as much as possible to you, my readers.
I’ll also be removing the rest of the adsense from this blog – It just bugs me, and you are all way to clued up to click ads. I’ll be replacing this with a showcase of some of my best template work and upcoming Joomla Templates.
It’s been particularly hectic the past few weeks – My business partner, and much beloved younger brother, has been away. It’s amazing how much work there is to do when there is only one person to do the work of two.
The past couple of weeks I’ve mainly been finishing some enhancements to www.ninjakiwi.com, which was one of my biggest projects last year. NinjaKiwi receives over 100,000 visitors per day, is designed by yours truly, and is proudly running Joomla!
And this brings me to an interesting announcement – JoomlaBear is winding up client work and preparing to focus solely on Joomla Template production. 2009 will see more templates from Big Bear than you can shake a hosting account at.
On our test server a new JoomlaBear is being born that includes a phpBB powered forum, linked to the powerful Joomla user registration process via a wonderful Joomla plugin called JFusion. This allows users to register once on either the phpBB forum, or Joomla’s front end, and the same user account then works for both applications.
And of course I’m using Wordpress here for the blog. So it looks like 2009 will also be the year that JoomlaBear tries to keep his fingers in all the best open source CMS projects 
And I will certainly be writing more on the Joomla vs. Wordpress debate which I find increasingly interesting, and difficult to answer! As both systems have some obvious strengths, and weaknesses.
If you have thoughts, or requests for topics you would like me to write about, then by all means leave me a comment. My primary skills include 12 years of web development and design with PHP, Flash, HTML and CSS. Joomla, Wordpress, Photoshop & Fireworks are some of my best buddies – we hang out all the time. I have focused a lot of energy on Internet Marketing in recent years and have plenty of SEO stories to tell.
Wishing you all well and look forward to hearing from you.
Big Bear
Increase Web Traffic With Connect Content
Update September 2009 – The network described below has been aquired by another organization, teh founder has begun work on another project involving posting articles. I encourage you to check it out.
Updated: I posted a quick update to this with my progress after only one week with Connect Content. I will post shortly on my progress after one month because the results have surpassed my expectations.
To my small group of dedicated readers 
I want to encourage you to consider a new way to increase web traffic to your site.
It’s called ConnectContent and it’s a site that networks you anonymously with other site owners who want to get one way backlinks. Rather than exchange links directly there is such a large pool of people in the ConnectContent network that one user can link to another persons site and yet another user can link back to the first persons site. I recently joined up and in just a few days have seen some direct improvement.
ConnectContent has been setup by RT Cunningham, a fine upstanding gentleman who also runs Untwisted Vortex.
If you want more detail then please read on, but before you do I want you to know ConnectContent is a subscription service that costs $12 USD per month. I think this is absolutely peanuts for what you get back. However, I don’t want to kid you into reading a long post if this cost is completely prohibitive. Additionally to get the most out of the service and maximise the increase in web traffic you will want to have at least one decent site running already, and the more the better.
For many of you reading this you have probably come to JoomlaBear to get a Joomla Template and are either thinking of setting up a web site with Joomla or already have one or two sites running on Joomla already.
What you may not have considered is how you are going to drive traffic to your site? Where will those precious visitors come from?
The answer to that question is almost always links, links and more links. You need people to link to you for two reasons:
- It will bring more traffic simply through people clicking on those links.
- Secondly, and of far more importance, it lets the search engines know that your site has the backing of it’s peers and this in turn causes the search engines to rank your site higher for its subject area, the keywords found in your web pages. The higher you rank the more traffic will come to you from the search engines.
Now if this is all quite new to you then read on as the information below is really a primer on some search engine optimization basics and how to get the most out of your links.
Links are great whenever you can get them but what really helps, I mean really really helps, is having links with anchor text that contains keywords relevant to the topic of your site.
I’ll give you an example and I’ll use the new site I want to plug here called ConnectContent. You can see I’ve just linked the site name so “ConnectContent” becomes the anchor text.
But if I wanted to help out the site a little more I would want to use different anchor text in my link because this will tell the search engines what I think the site is about and help it to rank higher for the keywords in my anchor text.
Now when I think about what ConnectContent is about I can sum it up by saying it’s a really good way to Increase Web Traffic.
There you go! I’ve now given the search engines some food – I’m still linking to http://connectcontent.com but now my link above has some valuable information for the search engines to digest!
From my anchor text they can see that I think ConnectContent has some relevance to “Increase Web Traffic”.
Now if ConnectContent can get enough links with good anchor text, i.e. containing keywords related to increasing website traffic, and other similar related keyword phrases, then the search engines will start to rank ConnectContent very highly when people search for these terms.
So what is ConnectContent all about? well quite literally it connects people who would like to get links back to their site in return for giving a few links to other people. This does not mean just exchanging links, or reciprocal linking. But rather the system lets you submit the pages you would like linked to, along with your desired anchor text and then other users can pick these up and will give you links back.
In return you need to link to other peoples sites. Quite simply the more links you give the more you will get back. The system is fairly anonymous and no names are mentioned. Your sites will be shown in a list of sites wanting backlinks.
In the online world it’s all about how much traffic you can drive to your site. And although content is king in many peoples minds sometimes it isn’t quite enough to kick start your web presence and leverage your site into a profitable state.
If you want to increase web traffic and are willing to do a bit of work for it then I recommend ConnectContent.
Remember, before you sign up you should have a number of sites going and you should be aware of what keywords you are chasing. You also need to have sites/blogs you are prepared to use to post links to other people in the ConnectContent network. If you don’t have these pre-requsites then it may not be the right choice for you. However the more sites you run, or a prepared to setup, the more you will get out of the network.
If you are still scratching your head and wondering what all this is about then I recommend reading up on Grizz’s Make Money Online blog as he has a ton of useful information on getting your site traffic and making it profitable.
If you have any questions then please don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment.
Finally this is the release statement from RT himself as published on Grizz’s blog http://makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/:
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R.T. Cunningham – ConnectContent.com
As Griz has mentioned many times on both of his make money online blogs, there are multiple ways to build backlinks. I don’t want to spend any time rehashing what works because I want to emphasize a different and possibly better approach to building backlinks. Before I do that, however, I want to quickly mention what doesn’t work very well.
Comment Chasing
A whole lot of people spend a whole lot of time commenting on “do follow” blogs in their efforts to build backlinks. There are several problems with this tactic. If the blog owner doesn’t delete your keyword anchored in the name field, chances are that your keyword still won’t be related to the topic at hand. While experts may tell you that any backlink is better than no backlink, backlinks that have little relevance don’t do much — they don’t carry any link authority.
Reciprocal Link Exchanges
Besides carrying far less weight than one-way links, reciprocal link exchanges between relevant blogs takes up a lot of time. In my opinion, that time is far better spent on working out one-way link exchanges. One-way link exchanges are actually the same thing as reciprocal links, but without being directly linked. Party A links to one of party B’s posts and party B links to one of party A’s posts but from a different post.
The hardest part about link exchanges of any kind is getting the links with the right, targeted anchor terms. Anchor terms that point to blog post titles, blog titles, blog author names, etc. are just about worthless most of the time.
The White Hat Google Game
If you read what Google has to say about link exchanges, you have to write content that naturally compels readers to link to the source to be completely safe. It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t work in the real world unless you’re a socially popular blogger.
That kind of thing defeats the purpose of targeting search visitors in the first place and doesn’t make any money for you or for Google. In my personal opinion, it’s a smokescreen for what they really want you to do and I’ll leave it at that.
What Always Works
Linking from within a post to another post on another blog with targeted, relevant anchor terms will always carry the greatest amount of link authority. You can get very few links of this kind and literally watch an optimized post rise to page 1 of the Google SERPS if it doesn’t have too much competition. If you get a lot of links of this kind, you’ll destroy the competition.
This is where ConnectContent comes into the picture. It’s all about embedding relevant anchor terms into older posts or creating new posts around relevant anchor terms. The procedure is so simple, it’s almost ridiculous. You list your desired anchor terms and where you want them to point to and other people grab that information and put it to work. The site takes care of the tracking part of it.
It isn’t free ($12.00/month or $120.00/year) even though I think it should be. The problem with providing a powerful tool like this for free is that the scammers and spammers would come out of the woodwork to take advantage of it while everyone else would get left behind. Not only that, but I think the generous 50% commission could really be another asset for anyone able to drive the affiliate sales.
Would you get penalized by Google?
Since I announced the public launch of ConnectContent, the most frequently asked question has been “Does it leave a footprint that Google can detect?” The short answer is “No, not if you do it the way you’re supposed to do it.”
Ever since people were slapped by Google for doing sponsored posts (paid links), something I call “Google Paranoia” has set in. Everyone seems to be worried about getting penalized by Google for one thing or another. I think the biggest problem is that people refuse to read, or they don’t understand, the Google webmaster guidelines concerning – Webmaster Help Center” link schemes.
Google talks about excessive link exchanges, both reciprocal and otherwise. In other places, Google talks about relevance. The Google search engine algorithms are all designed around relevance because that’s where they make their money — by showing AdSense targeted to specific content. Their automated spam detection techniques are also based around relevance. Their algorithms, other than checking for duplicate content, are very good.
ConnectContent is a link exchange in the loosest meaning of the phrase, and not much more than the web as a whole. The entire purpose of the network is to list what you want as anchor terms as opposed to people guessing what you want. There is no guarantee that your requested terms will ever get linked to and that’s what sets it apart from other networks and it’s why I think it wouldn’t matter to Google even if they knew what links were being generated and where.
Despite my beliefs, I don’t want to make it easy for anyone (not necessarily Google) to see what’s going on. No real names are ever used and nothing is publicly displayed outside of the network. I’m more concerned with malicious individuals (your competitors) than I am with Google. The gist of all this is that producing logical and relevant backlinks should never incur the wrath of Google.
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Thanks RT.
ConnectContent
