I was going through some of my older sites this morning with a view to updating them. These sites have been online in some form or another for anything up to 9 years.

On one particular site (first made in 2002), I noticed that 90% of the pages WITH Adsense on them also had Page Rank (PR) of 2 or 3. Those WITHOUT Adsense had "Grey Bar" PR. Interesting. I then checked some other old, old sites, and found pretty much the same results;

• Pages with Adsense have PR.
• Pages without Adsense have no PR (or much lower PR).

Now, these results are found site by site, that is; some pages within a given site have Adsense and PR. Some pages within the same site have no Adsense and no PR. Some are anomalies - having PR without Adsense, or Adsense without PR - but the anomalies are few and far between!

I then went on to check a few other sites, and see the same behaviour. Adsense == PR, or PR == Adsense.

With the proliferation of MFA (Made For Adsense) sites, I am thinking that most Adsense Publishers have only placed Adsense on newer pages - pages made within the last few years.

For my own reasons, I tended to make websites without any monetisation for a few years - then when Adsense came out I added it to those pages. In other words, my old, old sites are not MFA - they also never got beaten to death with all the tricks of the trade for gaining entry into Search Engines and so on. They were just made with decent content, then forgotten about…

My Conclusion

On old sites (those that have been in the SERPs [Search Engine Result Pages) > 5 years) is Google favouring pages with Adsense over those without Adsense? Could it be that by favouring these pages, Google sends them more visitors, consequently earning themselves more income via Adsense? I believe that WII-FM is at play. Google is thinking "What's In It For Me".

On a page without Adsense, what (in monetary terms) is in it for Google? Absolutely Nothing.

If anyone else has sites that are older than (say) 5 or 6 years, and has Adsense on some pages but not others - do you see the same behaviour?

Spider Bots

I wonder if a visit by the Adsense Bot back in the past somehow contributed to how Google look(ed) at old pages…

It's a conspiracy I say. Where's my Tin Foil Hat.