Take care when setting up advertiser links on your site

When taking on advertisers, the webmaster is faced with the paradox of trying to keep visitors on their site, as well as providing clickthroughs from the site to advertisers.

After all, if the advertisers aren’t getting their clicks, why advertise?

I just made a big mistake on one of my sites though.

I thought I’d be clever, and instead of placing advertising links in the main left nav bar, and thus distract visitors, I thought I’d create a new narrow column between the left navigation bar, and the main content, and made to look as part of the main page content.

That way, the advertiser links get attention without distracting from the main navigation. Good for human users, yes?

I just ran a site:DOMAIN check on Google. And was horrified to find that Google had included the advertiser links as the description for almost every single entry.

After initial paranoia, I realised that Google was able to factor in the main navigation and was instead trying to find the main content to provide the listing.

As the advertiser section was dynamic, when Google processed the page information, it thought the new narrow column was actually the beginning of the site content, and so gave it prominence in the descriptions.

I can’t think of a better way to kill your clickthroughs from search engine results, than to have irrelevant information on the description listings.

Now I’ll have to wait for the Googlebot to return and reindex the pages so that the actual main body content of the pages will show up first.

Next time, I’ll try to be less clever with finding new places for advertiser links.