- what Google never told you …”
- by Joel Comm (2006)
ISBN: 1-933596-70-8 Morgan James Publishing, NY.
My Rating of this book: 2/7
By A. Nielsen
When I bought this book on Amazon I noticed that from the 54 customer reviews the book had an average rating of 4½/5. I simply cannot believe that this book should come near to a rating of 4½/5 based on an average from 54 users.
Unfortunately, within the field of SEO a lot of reviews seem fake.
The back cover promises that the book will reveal some of the secrets on how to create a passive income with Google Adsense. The front cover even has the word strategy written over it.
Even though this book might be worth reading for people who has just signed up to Google Adsense, no secrets are revealed in this book. The book is more like of a big sales talk without any real content and the content that can be found in this book could probably be rewritten to about 4-5 pages.
The bonus material promises is links to Google Adsense resources that are widely known on the internet.
Most of the resources recommended in this book require an API-key. I think it is unlikely that the people who might benefit from reading this book have an API-key. As far as I know Google has now closed for
issuing more API-keys.
What is also missing in this book is better index of its content. Say that a reader wants to now more about which colors to use. He or she is no able to find that information in the index of the book. Anyway, the
recommendation of blue 0000FF is quite OK for starters, but other colors works fine as well.
The book offers a chapter about building content and recommends resources providing free articles.
I don't think the internet will benefit from more scraped articles or blogs filled with scraped content.
A full chapter is devoted to smart pricing. Joel gives the clever headline: Don’t remove the Adsense code from pages with low CTR; remove it from pages with low ROI. This may be correct, by in my view this is an oversimplification. It remains to be proven that smart pricing works account wide and not some combination of account wide and for individual sites and additionally, one may benefit from smart pricing by getting relatively well paid on highly visited sites with poor estimated ROI content because one has some sites with an estimated high ROI but with less visitors.
Furthermore, there can be many other reasons for removing ads on sites.
As Joel Comm is obviously an expert on Adsense it’s a shame he doesn’t use his potential to write a quality book revealing something useful about Google Adsense.