ads banner placement in default theme

Involved Joined: Jul 03, 2006 Posts: 273

Please don't think I am trying to be difficult by my comments on the discussion I am only trying to understand cause for 1 I am not fully versed on the Ads module but 2 I also am still lost on the search engine bots importance in relation to it.

The only reason I could see one being concerned about what a search engine sees is perhaps for the purpose of PR and indexing however it is my understanding that search engines frown upon paid links being indexed so your advertising links should be including nofollows by default. So with that in mind what other reason would you be concerned whether or not a search engine sees a duplicate ad? After all it is only a link and therefor not enough to be a duplicate content penalty. This is the part I am hoping you can explain?

The way I see the Ads system based on your description and based on possible need or want to spread the ads in a unique view basis would be like this:

Currently to reduce the amount of Dups you can do as you say and change the "X" label of the ones on page making the pools of ads more unique. This is great for solving the on this page this one time dups issue. But when they refresh or visit another page then dups can occur with all or some of the ads previously viewed. So to solve that is why I recommend the cookie. Of course tables could be used to do a better job but cookies is simple with less overhead on the DB and should provide a reasonable solution.

1st you would need to modify very slightly the ads() function to ADD to an array ad results it comes up with. Of course you would also have to include a cookie check and read if exists and compare the last set of ads used to reduce duplicate if this your desire.

Then you write a cookie with the array serialized so the next page/refresh has the cookie set to compare against therefor increase unique ad exposure.

When its a bot I wouldn't worry at all that you can't set the cookie but as I say if you believe there is a good reason to be concerned for what the bot sees then please explain that so I can understand. Perhaps then I can contribute different ideas as well.

Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 9:30 am

I am trying not to come across as 'difficult' either and I am not taking your comments as such, it's great to have debate these things Wink

I'm going off-topic but there are two main reason why you would want to buy an ad on a third party site;
1 - so visitors to the site see the ad and click-through; this generates traffic to your site as well as potential sales.
2 - so the link to your site via the banner is indexed and therefore promotes your site via backlinks.

Using cookies for control is fine for users (most have cookies enabled in their browsers) and it wouldn't 'hurt' for a bot to see two or more ads which are the same - the downside is, currently it should generate two 'impressions' on the ad instead of one which means your client is wasting money and probably wouldn't be too happy if he found out.
If your ads are time base ie. 'per month' then it really doean't matter IMHO.
I really need to dig through the code that's not going to happen until I fix my PC.

Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 9:43 am

Guardian2003 wrote:

2 - so the link to your site via the banner is indexed and therefore promotes your site via backlinks.

Google requires that PAID links should be nofollow. if google thinks the link to your site is paid then the will remove your indexing. Therefor if you are nofollowing then the number of times the link is included wouldn't make a difference on indexing. So then the cookie not being set for the search engine makes no difference.

The use of paid advertising links should be strictly limited to Advertising to users. To use it for backlinking could hurt your indexing.

Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 9:52 am

I'm just wondering if anyone is really using the "impressions" feature and controlling ads by it. There is logic in the mainfile ads() function that sees if an ad has used up all the impressions for it and then emails the client if the impressions are exhausted. Does anyone use that?

Personally, in what little I have done with ads I just set impressions to 0 (unlimited). I reach agreement with the client on how long the ad will run (say a month) and then if that time passes and he doesn't want to renew I'd just administratively deactivate the ad. I don't know how valid the impressions count would be especially with search engines hitting the site.

In terms of positioning what we really need is a rewritten or alternative version of ads(). You could for instance write something that all themes could use. Call it ads_banners(). Use a position number for "left_banner" and one for "center_banner" and one for "right banner". Say, they are positions 9, 10, and 11 respectively. Classify ads that you want to have in the banner area into one of those. Then retrieve all the position 9's and randomly pick one and wrap it in a left aligned div in the banner area. Do the same for position 10 and position 11 with a center aligned div and a right aligned one.

The code to do this is all basically right there in ads() and also in the advertising_block, you'd just need to modify it to present 3 ads in a row in the banner. And of course the advertising_block itself can be replicated to position ads anywhere using block positioning. You could also dedicate a block to a specific ad if you wanted so it would always show up. The SQL modifications would be minor.

From a RN perspective we first need to straighten out the basic advertising code. It's a mess and get's messier the more I dig. Hopefully 2.4 will give us a solid foundation going forward to meet the needs expressed here.

Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 10:00 am

I have never once used the "impressions" feature. I would MUCH rather have some calendar logic. This banner runs for 1 month....at the end of the month it is deactivated if I do not add more time.

If you are going to have the "e-mail the client feature" and On, Off switch would be nice. I would think an "e-mail the webmaster" would be a more used option.

Just my .02

Dawg

Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 12:48 pm

@ Dawg I agree; auto-deactivation and mail routines would be nice. Maybe it's something we could look at for post 2.4 release.