Quick question,

I'm still learning and researching how Adsense works and all, but I ran across a site today that is ranked number in the google search engine for that topic, but it promotes no kind of Adsense or any ad promotion from other companies. How is this possible? Also, the website has NO design layout whatsoever? I'm not putting down the site, was just wandering how can someone accomplish a high ranking like that without any article content. Check it out:http://www.traveltalkonline.com/

This is a good topic to discuss, Kevin.

There are a lot of heavily trafficked sites who opt not to use AdSense. Some people make a lot more money by selling ad space directly to advertisers. I noticed that forum on that site is heavily trafficked and with travel being such a hot niche, the owner probably makes a killing from the banner ads at the top of the forum.

I know Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net stopped using AdSense and his site and it gets thousands of visitors per day. One of this reasons was his audience. Since he attracts mostly webmasters, they tend to be more aware of Google ads and ignore them. So his CTR was low. He figured he could make more money from selling ad space and his experiment proved this was indeed true.

He also said he was able to reel in some bigger-named advertisers without AdSense because they told him they believe AdSense cheapens a site.

Now, me personally, if I owned that travel forum/site I'd definitely use AdSense at least in some capacity, but I've heard about a lot of people who choose not to for various reasons.

And to answer your other question about how did this person get so popular. This webmaster could also have another heavily trafficked travel-related site he used to promote the forum and that helped make it popular.

I seriously doubt that forum became popular by just creating a stand-alone forum... unless the owner had a bunch of money to shell out on paid advertising to get it off the ground.

Interesting discussion, though. I'd love to hear other people's take on this.

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What does that mean actually? Is it like, the person earns money from an advertiser just for putting the ad on his site, that is, the advertiser pays him whether visitors click on the ad or not?

About the top ranking - it may be since the site has been around for a long time, since 2000. That might be one of the reasons that it's ranked at the top.

Yep, that's exactly right, TxG. This can be done directly by the webmaster or through a third party like company adbrite.com

Hi Kevin, just curious, what keywords is the forum ranked at the top for?

Like TxG mentioned, the age of the forum plays a key role in its high ranking. But, I would speculate that search engines rank the content from active forums highly, because, if you think about it, forum discussions address very specific questions that may not be found in websites. So a forum would contain unique content that gets updated fairly regularly.

As far as the point you made about the design... this goes to support the principle that good content will always beat a pretty design in the search engine rankings.

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Wow, no offense to the owner but that site really does look ridiculously simplistic and boring. But hey, if they're making money who am I to judge right? I wish I had a simplistic and boring site ranked high.

I'm curious too. What exactly are they ranking high for and how do you know those keywords are heavily searched for?

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