Firstpost.com took a moment to meditate on Facebook’s ninth birthday, how the social media website has the numbers on its side at this point. Linking to a study by Global Web Index, they show that Facebook is still smoking the online competition in active usage, with Google+ coming in a distant second. As we know, Facebook has evolved quite a bit since its onset (i.e. Timeline, Likes and such).

In January, the website launched Graph Search, which enables users to search Facebook for photos, places, likes and other people’s profiles. Soon to come, too, is a more complex status updating system, which will let users share activities. (In short, it’ll be more customized expression, less in our own words.)  Facebook has stuck around, proving wrong the MySpace model of decline and dominating public discourse. Since Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com on February 4th, 2004, it’s become a common denominator in journalism. No publication goes without having a page.

“Como una cortesía para The Courant, por demostrando ignorancia y falta de respeto a su propia comunidad, déjeme decir: lo cagaron.”

If you were to translate this using Google Translate, guess what… it would be wrong. Anyone who is bilingual wouldn’t be surprised. But they would be surprised in hearing that a news organization would solely depend on using this primitive service as their “Spanish-language strategy.”

Sadly, this isn’t a joke: Hartford Courant’s Spanish site is Google Translate by Poynter.

But, instead of just being disgusted or insulted by The Courant’s “strategy,” let me offer some tips for an actual strategy:

1. Hire a diverse staff, and in this case, a Spanish speaker. Listen to them. Anyone in their right mind would have told you this was a bad idea.
2. I know resources are tight, as an affordable alternative to hiring more staff, partner up with the local Spanish-language news organizations. Believe me, they are there. And they’d love to help you inform the community. (Hey Courant, have you tried working with Connecticut’s Latino News Source: ctlatinonews.com?)
3. No Spanish-language news organization in your town? Look again. Think radio, newsletters or neighboring towns. Any of these will be better than an automated site.
4. Still confused? Reach out to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists to find local members in your area, including Spanish-language news organizations.
5. But, let’s say there are no Spanish-language news outlets. Partner up with the largest, Spanish-language local business. They know their community and are fully aware of the information network that is functioning now.

Lastly, apologize to the fastest growing demographic in your community for treating them with such little respect. It’s not a smart business move to belittle them, especially if you want to tap into their growing influence.

I preach experimentation, risk taking and embracing failure. You experimented and took a risk… and you failed. Oh, did you fail.

Learn from your big mistake and start genuinely engaging with your own diverse community.

Do you have any tips for The Courant or any other news organization trying to serve its Latino community? Please share them in the comments.

Oh, and if you are wondering, here’s how I’d translate my statement:

“As a courtesy to The Courant, for displaying its ignorance and lack of respect to its own community, let me say: you f&*#d up.”

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail (r.hernandez@usc.edu) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

Several times a week, I open my snail mail box to find bulk-mail solicitations for some member of one of my websites, but sent to the site’s street address. Every month or so, I’ll get a series of calls to my business phone (which is listed on my website), but the caller will ask for a name I’ve never heard. For the rest of that week, I’ll get dozens of similar calls, from different people calling on behalf of some work-at-home scheme, all asking for the same fake name.

And whenever I’m stuck searching for information via Google or Bing, I inevitably have to scroll past link after link to scraped websites – pages written not by any human being, but slapped together by scripts created to blend snippets from other webpages into something that will fool Google’s or Bing’s algorithm into promoting them.

If Google really wants to make its search engine results pages more meaningful, forget about adding links from my Google+ friends. How about creating a scraper-free search engine, instead?

I have no doubt that the reason why I get all those misaddressed letters and wrong-number phone calls is that some fly-by-night “data” company scraped together a database by mashing up names, street addresses and phone numbers it crawled on various websites. That database gets laundered through some work-at-home company, which sells it to customers suckers via the Internet as a “lead list” for commission sales.

It’s bad enough to take phone calls from these poor chumps, who think that they’ve taken a step toward earning some honest income. But I’m stunned when I see the bogus-name letters coming to my office from established colleges and non-profit institutions, who clearly also have bought crap mailing lists.

(FWIW, all my phone numbers are on the National Do-Not-Call Registry, and I’m opted out of commercial snail mail with the Direct Marketing Association, so no legitimate data company should be selling my contact information to businesses and organizations I’ve not dealt with before.)

Maybe it’s too much to hope for a solution that frees me from having to throw away all these unwanted letters and beg off these unwanted phone calls. (Not to mention saving the people contacting the expense of pursuing bogus leads.) But maybe I can hope for a scraper-free Internet experience instead.

I know it’s possible, because there used to be a scraper-free search engine – one that searched just hand-picked Web sites created by actual human beings. It was called Yahoo!, and if they’re smart, the latest crew of new managers at Yahoo! could do far worse than trying to recreate a 2012 version of their Web directory, then using it to populate a Google-killing search engine.

For an example of the garbage polluting search engines today, this site came up high in the SERPs when I searched recently for my wife’s name and the name of her website.

If you know anything about the violin, you should be ROTFL now. For those who aren’t violin fans, allow me to explain that Ivan Galamian, one of the great violin pedagogues of the 20th century, has been dead for over 30 years. While we would have loved to have someone of his stature working for us at Violinist.com, only an idiot scraper script would think he works for us now.

It kills me that good websites, blogs and journals written by thoughtful correspondents get pushed down in the SERPs – and overlooked by potential fans – because of this garbage.

I want a search engine that knows better – that excludes Web domains populated by scraped data and instead searches online sites written by actual human beings. I wouldn’t limit such a search engine to sites written by paid, professional staff. There’s too much rich content to be found in the conversations of others. But blogs, discussion boards and rating-and-review sites included in this search engine should be composed of information submitted by human beings, not scraped from other websites and edited together by bots.

The original Yahoo! lost when start-up rival Google indexed more pages than Yahoo, giving Google an edge over its established competition. But I – and, I suspect, many others – don’t care about the size of a search engine’s database any longer. Google’s right on in its attempt, announced today, to build a more human-driven search engine. But I’m not convinced that adding Google+ links to the SERPs is enough of a change to make a difference in quality.

First, not enough people use Google+. Its 18-and-over-only age limit also disqualifies the millions of teen-agers who help drive the digital conversation. And I fear that Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” approach simply will encourage spammers to flood Google+ with even more bogus accounts and friend requests, in order to boost their reach into the Google SERPs those new “friends” see.

It’s great to use social media to help bring more people into the process of selecting which websites should be indexed in a search engine. But, ultimately, at this point organizations still need more aggressive in-house human oversight in back-checking the results.

Google lost its quality control over its SERPs long ago. Whether it’s search engine results or business lead lists, there’s too much crap data on the market today. That illustrates the continued need for more, and better, human leadership of data cultivation. There’s a market need out there. So who’s going to step forward to fulfill it?

But that’s not enough for you.

If you’re like me, the tools and metrics you use to connect with your audience through the major social media services aren’t enough. We’re greedy consumers, we news publishers, and we want more.

In that spirit, here is my wish list of tools I’d like to see the major social media services provide to news publishers.

On Facebook

I’d love to be able to see, somewhere, a list of everyone who has liked a URL from my site that has been posted to Facebook. Or even just a reliable number of how many people might be on that list. As it stands now, I see different numbers on the “Like” buttons we post on the articles themselves, and on the links posted to my sites’ Facebook pages. And I have no way to track likes of that URL if it is independently posted to FB by people with which I’m not friends or to whom I don’t subscribe. C’mon, Facebook. Let publishers see exactly how many people like their stuff.

I’d also like to know what people are saying around Facebook about the pieces published to my websites. I’ve started using Facebook’s comments application on one of my websites, and like how it cross-posts comments made on my site to commentors’ Facebook walls (increasing the visibility of the post). But how cool would it be if I had the option to allow that app to also display all comments about that URL posted anywhere on Facebook? Or, if I didn’t want to use Facebook’s comments app, if I had the option on my site’s Facebook page to pull in all FB comments about that piece? For pieces that generate hundreds of comments, give the page administrator the option to select the top comments for display on the page. Either way, this tool would encourage greater interaction between publishers and Facebook, and empower publishers to better connect with the audience that’s talking about their work.

Self-appointed privacy police officers, cover your ears now. As a publisher, I would love for Facebook to give me the ability to target ads to people who have liked an article on my domain, but who are not yet fans of my Facebook page. I don’t need to know their names. Just give me that as an option in Facebook’s ad placement tool. People who already have shown that they like my site’s stuff are my strongest leads as I try to solicit more fans on Facebook. Give me, and other publishers, the ability to reach them specifically, instead of hoping that I catch them in one of the other the targeting criteria that Facebook now supports. (If I had this ability, I would be spending additional promotional money with Facebook today.)

On Google

Obviously, I’m awaiting the introduction of publication accounts on Google Plus, which are said to be in testing now. My site’s brand name is more important to my website marketing effort than my personal name is, and I’d like to have a Google Plus account that speaks as the site, rather than as me. Heaven knows most my readers care more about connecting with the site than with me personally, anyway.

But how will that publication account be managed? This gets me into my fondest wish for Google: That it blow up the Google Accounts system and construct something much more like Facebook’s account architecture. Seriously, data management in Google Accounts is a mess, thanks to Google trying to hack together registration accounts from the umpteen different services it has acquired or created over the years.

I’ve written before of the mess that ensued after Google assigned me a YouTube account from another user who was squatting on my trademark. Instead of allowing the other user to close his YouTube account, then transfer the now-available account name to me, Google kept the old user’s demographic information attached to the YouTube account when transferring it under the control of my Google Account. During the switch, Google allowed my Google Account to inherit the demographic information of the other user’s YouTube account, leaving Google to believe that I am now 16. Whoops.

So now I have two Google Accounts, one for that YouTube account, Gmail and AdSense, and another that I use for Google Plus and my original YouTube account. That’s silly. I’d much rather Google recreate its Account system so individual service accounts never overwrite demographic information on the “parent” Google Account. Then, it should allow one Google Account to administer multiple accounts on the same service. Facebook doesn’t limit my Facebook account to administering a single Facebook page. My Google Account shouldn’t be limited to administering a single YouTube account, either.

Publishers often deal with multiple brands, and assign multiple employees or contractors to manage them. I’d like to assign some freelance video editors to help maintain my YouTube channel. But I don’t want to give them a log-in that also accesses my Gmail and AdSense account. Nor do I want to have to create yet another Google Account that I would have to change the password for every time an editor stopped working with me. On a Facebook page, all I’d have to do is revoke the admin access for that editor. I’d like to see the same functionality on Google.

On Twitter

One of Twitter’s strength is its simplicity. So I’m willing to keep my wish list from that service simple, too.

Fix the search function.

If someone types a brand name in the search box, lead the search results with account names which match that brand, rather than a jumble of individual tweets. It’s frustrating to have to go to Google to find Twitter accounts, but that’s a better alternative now than using Twitter’s own search box. Obviously, that move would make it easier for potential followers to find my publication’s feed within Twitter. (Some apps do this better than the Twitter site itself.)

Beyond that, I’d like to see a few changes that would help improve Twitter as a reporting resource. Give me the ability to restrict my searches to my own timeline, my own tweets or the tweets of another individual Twitter user. (Again, without having to turn to third-party tools.) Finally, I’d love a private bookmark feature, so I wouldn’t have to “favorite” a post to retain it for future reference. Many reporters I know use the favorite for this purpose, but making a post as a “favorite” ought to mean just that. And I particularly like the idea of my bookmarks being public, either, as favorites are.

That’s my list. What’s yours?

First, Google’s launched a new program to identify authors and attribute their webpages to them. The program uses authors’ personal Google Profile pages as the focal point for listing and linking all their current work around the Web.

The program provides some additional visibility to participating authors’ work in exchange for their linking more visibly to their Google Profile pages. (Here’s mine, so you can see how this works from that end.)

It’s a relatively easy four-step process to participate. But you’ll need access to the content management system your publication runs.

First, you’ll need to add a rel=”author” attribute to the anchor tags around the bylines of your articles. That anchor tag should hyperlink your author profile page on the same Web domain.

Second, that author profile page will need to include a link back to your Google Profile. And the anchor tag linking the Google Profile should include a rel=”me” attribute.

Third, in the links section of your Google Profile, you should include a link back to the author profile page on your website, checking the box that “this page is specifically about me.”

Fourth, make sure that the “+1″ tab on your Google Profile is set to public. If you want to make sure you did everything correctly, you can ask for Google to review your work by filling out this form.

What happens then?

Google will begin adding all of your bylined articles to the +1 tab of your Google Profile. It will also automatically assign a “+1″ from you to those articles, so you don’t have to manually hype your own stuff to the search engine anymore. Google also will add a thumbnail of your profile photo next to the links to each of your articles in its search engine results pages [SERPs].

What’s the value of those steps? I don’t know yet. It’s too early for me to tell if those steps are driving more traffic from Google to the articles that I write. Or if the additional +1s are moving my articles up in the SERPs, relative to where they would have been without them.

But, having been in situations where people have tried to copy my work online and pass it off as their own, I’m encouraged that this system exists by which Google is associating my work with my profile as soon as it’s published. It’s also just fun me to make code change on my website and see an immediate change in the Google SERPs. I don’t know if I’m moving up any spots, but I think having my picture there next to my work is kinda neat.

Google’s second initiative is over on YouTube.

For videos that appear on a website with an RSS feed, an “As seen on (Website name)” link now appears just below those videos on YouTube. That link sends readers to a new YouTube page for your website (not your website’s YouTube channel) that lists the most-recently linked YouTube videos on your site, and links back to the articles that embedded or referenced them. (Here’s an example from one of my websites.)

YouTube is building these pages from RSS feeds, looking for YouTube links and embed codes. Do note that YouTube appears to be referencing only the first link or embed code it finds in a post, ignoring additional videos in that post. And it ignores entirely posts without video links or embeds.

Again, I haven’t yet seen any increase in site or video traffic from this new feature. But I’m intrigued by the “Play All” option that appears on the top of YouTube’s generated pages for the videos on my sites.

The “Play All” option effectively creates a playlist of all those referenced videos, on the fly. With one click, I can watch videos from all of my recent blog posts, back to back, in a single stream.

That’s bringing us one step closer to the day when video-using websites adopt the functionality of a traditional television channel. While I enjoy the interactivity of online media, we won’t reach our largest possible audience until we offer an alternative for more passive consumers. We need to get to the moment when someone can switch on the television, click to an online channel, then watch video after video from that channel without having to navigate, much like I can sit in front of my TV and watch a traditional channel such as ABC or Comedy Central for as long as I want. When that happens, that’s the day that online blows up the television industry the way that it’s already blown up print media.

Finally, I wanted to mention why I’m not writing about Google Plus. It’s not that I haven’t gotten an invitation (and thank you to all who sent one). It’s that Google won’t let me use it. Whenever I go to plus.google.com, I get this message:

“This feature is not available for your account
You must be over a certain age to use this feature.”

Seeing as I’m 43, and that I find it hard to believe that Google developed a feature that’s only for use by Baby Boomers and older, I looked on my Google Dashboard to see just how old Google thinks I am.

Turns out, Google thinks I’m 16. The only place on the Google Dashboard that mentions age is under the YouTube settings, which lists my age as 16. Why? I don’t know, but I’m going to take a guess. I acquired a YouTube account name from another user, who was 16, so it appears that when Google transferred that account to my profile, it didn’t reassign my age to the YouTube account, but assigned the old YouTube account owner’s age to my profile. That’s the only explanation I can devise.

That seems like a pretty questionable data-management practice to me. (What happens if a 25-year-old transfers a YouTube account to a 16-year-old? Will that minor now get access to age-restricted videos on YouTube, as well as to Google Plus?) And why would Google launch a social media effort that excludes teenagers anyway?

Rather than create another Google Account just to get access to Plus, I’ve asked Google’s engineers to take a look at my case and to see if Google can list my age correctly. I suppose I could just create another Google account, but I’m hoping Google can correct its error with my current account. (I don’t want to have to put my friends and colleagues on Google Plus through the hassle of including me in their circles via one account now if I’m going to change back to my correct account at some point in the future.)

So I hope all you old folks are enjoying your time with Google Plus before we “teen-agers” crash your party. ;^)

Since I’ve been writing in recent weeks about search engines and how the affect news websites, I thought it worthwhile to remind folks (or tell our younger readers) what life was like in the era B.G. (Before Google). Because where we’ve been often provides some pretty good clues about where we’ll be heading in the future.

Before Google, search engines determined which sites appeared at the top of their search results pages almost exclusively based on what appeared on those webpages themselves. This led to webmasters (a term that I just discovered my autocorrect no longer recognizes – sigh) to pack their HTML code with what they thought were the most popular keywords and phrases that would bring people to that page.

So readers would be scrolling along such pages, then come to a long blank section of whitespace, where the page’s author had typed those keywords, over and over again, but set them in the same font color as the page background so that they would be invisible to a human reader. The words, though, would trigger a favorable placement for those keywords from the search engines.

Google came to dominate the search engine business because it found a way to work around this garbage, and to reward Web pages that actual human beings endorsed, rather than ones whose publishers best played the SEO games of the day.

In the early iteration of Google’s algorithm, a Web page was assigned a score, called “PageRank,” in large part based upon the total number of links pointing to that particular page. The more that other webmasters had chosen to link to a particular page, the higher it placed in Google’s results pages.

You didn’t even need to use a keyword on the page itself. So long as enough other people were using that word in their link to the your page, your page would rank highly in the Google results pages for that term (a phenomenon that came to be known as “Google Bombing”).

To use a phrase from today’s publishing era, Google was using social media to determine the value of a page online.

You don’t need a computer algorithms to parse worthy on-page content from the worthless when millions of Internet readers around the world are doing that with their links, likes, tweets and bookmarks. Just as Google won the 2000s by quantifying the social value of that decade’s most popular way of sharing information – the hyperlink – the search engine that wins the 2010s will be the one that most effectively indexes the social value of all the ways people share webpages today, from blogs to Facebook to Twitter and beyond.

I’m already seeing publishers react to Google’s crackdown on content farms, as my wife and I have been inundated with e-mails from content farmers (heh) who are now begging for in-bound links in an attempt to salvage some Google value for their websites.

My advice to news publishers? As always, think about your community. As I wrote last month, communities drive traffic. As Google and search entrepreneurs look for better ways to index social media, keep your focus on providing news and information that appeals to your community. Then, keep looking for ways to inspire and enable your community to share links to your work with others.

Yes, that means pasting “Like” and “Tweet” buttons on your pages. (See, the bottom of this article for examples.) But you won’t fully engage your community if that’s all you do. Start there, then monitor how people are using those tools. Listen to comments and engage your community in conversation across whatever platforms they use, while repeating links to your site wherever relevant. Remember, the person you’re conversing with knows about the original piece, but the hundreds of other lurkers dropping into the conversation might not. Keep giving out those links.

Unless you’re starting your own search engine, who wins or fails in the search engine business shouldn’t matter to you. You can’t control their algorithms. So don’t waste your time and sanity trying. Stick to two basic techniques: plain English optimization and engaging your community. Do these well, and the search engine referrals will take care of themselves over the long run.

That was true in the 1990s, and the 2000s, and remains true today.

Did you lose traffic? Gain it? Did you even notice?

Sistrix tracked the carnage among some of the top so-called content farms on the Internet, based on keyword positioning within search engine results pages [SERPs]. Among the losers in the Sistrix report were Associated Content, Mahalo and Examiner.com.

Personally, I don’t track keyword placement in SERPs for my websites. I track traffic and revenue. And I did see a drop in Google-directed traffic late last week on one of my websites, but a slight increase on the other. When I looked more closely at the loss in Google traffic, I didn’t see in decrease in referrals for the most popular keyphrases people were using to find my site, according to my Google Analytics report. All the loss seemed to be coming from the long tail, the all-but-forgotten, individually low-trafficked discussion threads and obscure listing pages on my site that I would just as soon Google ignore.

Well, consider that wish granted. The data does suggest to me, though, that Google’s not targeting entire sites with this latest algorithm change, but individual pages based on the thoroughness and uniqueness of their content.

Frankly, tracking keywords and obsessing about how highly your copy ranks in search engines provides one of the faster ways to go crazy in the online news business. With Google moving more toward highly personalized SERPs, chasing keywords is a fool’s pursuit.

It’s time to forget about SEO [Search Engine Optimization] and time to focus instead on PEO [Plain English Optimization].

Too many writers think of SEO as writing for computers, when their real focus should be writing to meet the needs of a human audience. Ask yourself these questions whenever you write:

• Are you writing about something that people have personal experience with or personal interest in? Can you express that audience “need” in 10 words or less? Have you done that in the story?
• Does your article do anything to provide a practical take-away that helps readers address this need, whether it be a to-do-list (even a short one) or at least relevant, previously unknown information about the topic? Can you describe that take-away in 10 words or less? Have you done that in the story?
• Are you writing using the words and phrases that normal readers – people who aren’t your sources and co-workers – use when they talk about this topic? Are you using the vocabulary of a 10th grader, or a 10-year professional in the field?
• Describe your piece in three words. Do those three words appear in the headline, the title tag or at least within the opening paragraph? How long does the reader have to read your piece before he or she will know what you’re writing about?
• Are you drowning your reporting under too many words?

These principles aren’t incompatible with SEO, in fact they’re part of what many of us have been suggesting as basic “white hat” SEO principles in the past.

But with SERPs so variable these days, and with too many writers unable to get over the idea that SEO is writing for machines, I think that many of us would find it easier, not to mention far more productive, to think about Plain English Optimization instead.

Think about the people who will read what you write. What are their needs? What are you doing to help meet at least one of those needs in this piece? Are you keeping it clear and simple?

Write to PEO, and the SEO will take care of itself.

In theory, this all sounds good. Especially when one of the goals is to affect sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. None of these “low quality” sites are named, but I can see smoke coming up from Santa Monica: Demand Media is not happy about this. The company is in the middle of the rumored IPO and Google is possibly going to lower the ranking of content farm sites such as eHow.com. I would be angry, especially when most of your anticipated business value relies on writing stories based on popular search queries, i.e. farming content. Timing of the Google announcement is hardly an accident.

As tempting as it is to gloat over Demand Media’s misfortune, the Google announcement might have severe consequences to all publishing. The company doesn’t identify the sites it considers to be “low quality.” One of the things Google will attack are sites and pages with “repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

If you have hired a social media or search engine specialist, this is one of the key tricks you will be taught. Go out to the Internet, spread your links to comments and remember to include popular keywords in title, lead and body text. But Google is trying to build a search engine that understands natural language and true relationships between sites, an algorithm that is not fooled by clever cross-linking or keywords.

As a journalist, you have to support that. Otherwise the whole Web will look like the joke LAweekly published few days ago: “So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor.”

The big question is how will Google judge who is doing spammy, search-engine inspired headlines and who is doing real customer research with Google Analytics.

Let’s take Patch.com – not because it’s evil but because it’s probably one of the sites that could be impacted by Google’s dislike of content farming and shallow content. I am not saying Patch.com is doing either, but computers might think differently. Patch.com sites create a lot of content about wide variety of topics on their own neighborhood – something that an algorithm could think as trying to match the long-tail queries in your area. And Google emphasizes that there is no human judgment involved, just computers calculating the odds of junk content vs. not junk.

Should you be worried if you are doing data-driven content innovation on your site? Meaning that you get story ideas from following up what people search within your site, what keywords drive them to your site from Google and what does Google Zeitgeist tell you about the most popular searches during this time of the year.

I would not be too worried. Just keep on churning out good original content and pay less attention to eager SEO consultants. I hope Google is just transforming the whole publishing industry by making copies obsolete and helping people to find the original pieces of content.

Pekka Pekkala researches sustainable business models at USC Annenberg, is a partner at Fugu Media and a technology columnist. He used to be the head of development at Helsingin Sanomat, the largest Finnish newspaper.

To earn more money, try showing fewer ads.

You might think that online advertising works linearly: More ads = more money. (This equation certainly seems to reflect the thinking behind many ad-laden newspaper websites I read.)

But placing more ads on your website might actually hurt your ad network earnings – and not just because you’d be driving readers away with a lousy site experience.

Ad networks, such as Google’s AdSense (the network I use most often on my sites), often use complicated proprietary algorithms to decide which ads to show on your website, and how much they’ll charge the advertiser for each click. AdSense uses what Google bills as a real-time auction system to determine which ads show in the AdSense slots on a publisher’s site.

But it’s not simply a case of the highest bidder wins the space. Google’s system is trying to determine:

• what ads are relevant to the content of the webpage, or
• what ads are relevant to the interests of the reader on the page, and
• of those potential ads, which one would most be likely to elicit a click, then
• do the math to figure out if an ad less likely to elicit a click could actually earn the publisher more money, even factoring in the lower chances of getting clicked.
• And after all that, the system has to determine if the selected advertiser is behind or ahead of schedule for the amount of money they’ve been charged from their daily ad budget that day. If they’re too far ahead of schedule, the system ignores their ads for while and this selection process starts over again.

Finally, even after a reader clicks on an ad and the advertiser is charged, if too few of your readers come through for those advertisers after they leave your site – they fail to buy something, register on advertiser’s website or simply view enough pages there – Google might charge those advertisers less money for those clicks from your site. It’s called “smartpricing” and can cripple your revenue.

That’s more variables than I ever had to account for in my high-school calculus class.

If you don’t understand the way your ad network’s software “thinks,” you never can expect to make a living wage income from networked ads. But if you take the time to learn about these systems, you’ll come to realize that certain pages on your site actually can work against you.

If certain pages attract readers who aren’t likely to click on ads – or who are “flaky” and likely to click but never to do anything on the advertiser’s website – you’re likely better off without ads on those pages.

As a publisher, you should want to present the ad network with a series of pages that include content likely to attract readers who are both interested in advertisers related to that content and looking to buy or otherwise engage with those advertisers.

The more such readers you deliver, the more lucrative ads you will get from the ad network, earning you more money. The fewer you deliver, the less the ad network “thinks” of your website, which will lead to less lucrative and possibly less well-targeted ads, as the ad system casts about trying to find something that will engage your readers.

Here’s an experiment I’ve tried with great success:

I divide my websites into multiple channels in my AdSense reports. I’ve set up my content management system to publish different topics and services on the site into different URL paths, which can be tracked easily as channels by the AdSense reporting tool.

Then I look at the eCPM (earnings for every 1,000 pages viewed) for each of those channels, as well as the average eCPM for the site as a whole.

For every channel that earns less than 50 percent of the site’s overall eCPM rate, I take the ads off that channel.

The result? The last three times I’ve done this, I’ve yielded an average 15 percent increase in network ad revenue. That’s not a 15 percent increase in eCPM. That’s increase in bottom-line income. (ECPM, obviously, rises way more than that.)

This analysis also helps you identify which sections and topics on your website are earning you the best return on your reporting, writing and development investment, giving you better information with which to decide how you’ll spend your time and resources in the future.

I’m not arguing that you should ditch all your public interest reporting in favor of chasing the highest eCPMs. Or that you should drop lower-performing content from the website. I love Slashdot’s analogy of a successful website as an omelet. You need the right mix of ingredients for everything to come together in an attractive, tasty whole.

But just as not every section and feature of your website serves the same editorial purpose, several sections and features of your site will serve different business purposes as well. Some sections earn money, and should display ads. Others don’t, and should not display ads. Placing ad slots on unproductive sections of your website can hurt networked ad performance elsewhere on the site.

Obviously, you can’t try my method of culling ads from sections of your site every day. Eventually, you’ll come to a point where you cut too far, and overall ad revenue declines. If that happens, hurry to replace those most-recently eliminated ad spots.

After a while, you might try returning ads to some of those borderline underproductive channels, too. In my experience, some sections that performed poorly in the past can begin to perform better in the future – thanks to your site attracting a different mix of readers, or audience tastes changing. Even if that’s not the case, you might still see a nice increase in ad revenue from returning ads to some of those channels for a few weeks before their presence begins to drag down revenue elsewhere.

If you’ve the skill for it, properly timing the addition and deletion of ads from marginally productive channels can help you maximize ad revenue. Personally, though, I prefer to leave ads off channels once I’ve yanked them. I’ll return ads only if I see a change in traffic coming to one of those channels, usually following some news development on that topic that’s bringing new visitors to the site. Even then, I’ll check the revenue figures after a month or so, and if the channel eCPM remains below 50 percent of the site’s average, the ads are coming off again.

The questions focused on my final recommendation: “Create sharply focused evergreen topic pages”

Since this is the most important of my recommendations, I felt it deserved some extra attention, especially since some folks appear to be having a tough time wrapping their heads around it. If you follow all the rest of my advice but fail to create evergreen topic pages on your website, you might notice an improvement in AdSense earnings, but you won’t earn lucrative CMPs without them.

From the comments last week, a question:

“What is a ‘sharply focused’ evergreen content page?”

And from my e-mail, another:

“I’m wondering: you mention ‘evergreening’ your site. But won’t ‘niche’ sites that are specific to a handful of closely related topics get the same result, but also be updatable with daily news without making google’s bots upset?”

One OJR reader offered an answer to the first:

“My guess it means a [frequently] updated page that contains content with a common theme. for example, only sport news”

Not quite. A true evergreen page won’t be updated frequently. Its content should be written in a way that makes it, well, evergreen – able to stand as factual information for a relevant audience for a long period of time.

The page does focus on a single theme. But neither a niche website nor a topic index on a general news website necessarily serves the function of an evergreen topic page. A optimized evergreen topic page ought to focus on a single element within a theme – not just sports, for example, but on soccer officiating in the World Cup.

I understand why this might be a tough concept for some news veterans. After all, what I’m asking you to create is in several ways the opposite of what we do on a daily basis writing for newspapers or broadcast reports. This is a different product for a news organization, but one much closely aligned with its core mission than fake front pages or coupon deals.

An evergreen page doesn’t lead with the latest increment of knowledge about a story. It won’t be superseded tomorrow by fresher information. Its content is driven by readers are searching for through Google and other search engines, and not by what sources deliver us through events, document data, news releases or tips.

These pages stand apart from daily news updates on a news website, though sharp journalists should take advantage to refer to them to help bring new readers “up to speed” on the background behind hot news topics.

Start here: Forget for a moment that you work as a journalist. Think of a place or topic that you don’t cover, but in which have some curiosity: A hobby, or a favorite vacation destination, for examples.

Imagine that you are sitting down at your computer, with Google or Bing on your Web browser. What will you type to find information about that hobby or destination? Jot down those words, phrases or questions.

Now imagine that you are an uniformed reader, doing the same about the beat or place that you cover. Remember, you’re an uninformed reader, who’s not been reading your coverage. Stay general.

Write down those words, phrases and questions. Those will be the topics of your evergreen content pages. On those pages, you’ll provide the answers to those questions, or the detail behind words and phrases, ideally in less than 1,000 words.

The title of the page should be enclosed in an H1 tag, and include the relevant word, phrase or question that you’re addressing on that page. You also should use that in the lead paragraph of the article and at least three other times in the piece.

You might think this a sop to a search engine robot. Actually, it’s a writing trick to keep you on topic. Sharp focus is essential, both for attracting traffic and targeted ads to the page, as well as fulfilling your readers’ information need.

Finally, these pages must be linked to from the front page of your website, and ideally from all relevant internal pages as well. Burying links to these pages inside individual daily news stories won’t expose them to enough readers to build any viral support for the pages. And if they’re not linked to from the front page of the site, search engines won’t consider them important anyway.

A right-side navigation rail provides a great place to spotlight topic pages such as this. In fact, a right-side rail topped by a medium rectangle ad provides also provides a great home for a lucrative ad position. (See my post last week for more on that topic.) Plus, it loads all pages of your news website with this core keywords and phrases that you’ve identified.

We first started using evergreen topic pages on OJR, with the “How-to Guides” you’ll still find linked from the right side of the page. (FYI: We introduced them back when OJR was an ad-supported website with a student writing staff. We no longer run ads nor employ students on the site.) I stumbled onto the value of evergreen content pages when I wrote my “statistics every writer should know” tutorial in 1996. I added AdSense ads to that site in 2003 and continue to earn several hundred dollars a month from those pages today.

How many of you would like to be earning several hundred bucks a month from something you wrote 14 years ago? My hand’s up. How about yours?

Now let’s multiply that income by all the writers covering all the beats maintained in a larger news organization. Sharply focused evergreen content pages can provide an additional income opportunity for news organizations of all sizes.