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[glen]

Hi everyone, I just made the following post on the digitalpoint forum (slightly edited) and thought it was worth repeating here because it touches on an import Grey Hat SEO method for achieving a high click through rate on ads. I will leave it to you to decide whether this is ethical or not.

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Limiting the number of competing links on a webpage (so the ONLY hyperlinks on the page are those in google adsense ads) is certainly an effective way to drive up the click through rate.

Many inexperienced users don't even know how to use the back button! So they would click on an Adsense advertisement, even if it didn't really interest them! They would do this just to "keep moving".

You would only use this method (i.e. remove all navigation links and have zero competing links) if you were not seeking a repeat visit from the user because it would certainly be very annoying.

This is a pretty borderline web optimisation technique. It does not break the TOS as far as I can see but it is certainly in the "dark grey but not quite black hat" SEO zone.

I then went back and edited this post because I decided that perhaps there was a TOS issue after all -

EDIT - The google policies say -

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Site Functionality
Your site must not contain broken links and must be launched, functioning, and easily navigable.

So perhaps this would break the TOS if you removed all navigation.

Cheers, Glen