Google: Can Take 6+ Months to See Rankings Improve from Quality Improvements.
It's slow and hard work bringing some pages up to target readability. Especially the consumer-facing pages that need the higher scores. The text can start to take on a "Peter and Jane" feel.
Given experience of the slog involved, the default threshold currently remains at 55, 'tech-heavy' is now set at 40, and consumer-friendly at 72. (Wikipedia claims 80--90 is conversational English for consumers
, but I think that it would make me cry to go there, at least until I have a very reliable scoring system that does not choke on random parts of my page headers and footers.)
Since the common borderless 'native' Auto Ad format seems to be doing well for revenue, I have stripped the red border and 'Advertisements' tag from the generic ads that I still insert manually and algorithmically. I have even reset the actual ad style from my long-standing yellow background and red border that I use across multiple sites, back to AdSense defaults.
I have generalised the tagging mechanism to allow any article zero or more tags. As of today six tag 'words' are defined to indicate things from tech-heavy to social-media targeted. This is partly to drive a variable readability threshold, and partly to annotate the main site-guide links.
In passing: when I used Google to find a "CSS colour picker", G brought up its own interactive one directly above the search results!
I'm now computing (with a view to improving) the Flesch Reading Ease of my core pages, at the moment using the reado
npm
package. Currently I have set the default warning threshold at 55 fairly difficult to read
, but for core non-technical pieces will aim for ~85 "conversational English for consumers," while maybe letting heavy tech pieces get as low as 40 to 45.
I may look for a replacement for reado
in due course, as for quite a number of pages it reports 'NaN' rather than a useful score!
I have come across the suggestion that there should be an image for every 100 words for maximum shareability. That would be a tall order!
I have been tweaking the pages-incr
make target to ensure that if there is nothing that it can build then it terminates quickly, and conversely, if run enough times it will build everything that it can (the core pages of full and lite site versions).
I have an experiment with AdSense Ad Balance testing for a fill rate of 100% or 50% and for now 50% is not looking good. Possibly connected, possibly not, Auto Ads and Ad Balance between them seem to be inserting lots of unused (white) slots on my pages which look messy, and I should think could be avoided, even without causing scroll 'jank'.
I think that with Auto Ads and having tweaked some other settings to allow a slightly wider range of ad types, I am seeing a tiny increase in my still minuscule revenue!
2018-03-19 update: I cancelled that experiment and I have started a 100%/90% replacement experiment, which at first blush seems better.
2018-05-27: I cancelled that second experiment as it was showing ~25% RPM drop after an initially promising start. Also, given that in time for GDPR on the 25th I stopped most advertising other than EOU, so maybe half the traffic, I'm not clear that continuing the last 20 days out of 90 would be meaningful. Over 20,000 impressions had been racked up.