Caydel’s SEO Blog

Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but Michael Gray (Graywolf) about ‘MFA’-style pages he found while clicking around in his GMail.

I checked in my own account, found the pages in question, and found that there was more to this than Graywolf mentioned. At the top of the page, they have a 4X3 or 3X4 ‘Sponsored Links’ section containing Adsense ads, fairly well targetted to the subject you clicked on.

Below the Adsense-type ads, they have a list of 4-7 ‘Related Pages’ which point to news articles relating to the topic you clicked on. The ad copy is the headline of a news story, with the text containing the first sentence or so of the story itself.

Of course, these ‘Related Pages’ are also ads. For instance:

Layton hopes to mobilize Cdns against ATM fees; says banks don’t …
Canada.com - 8 hours ago
TORONTO (CP) - New Democrat leader Jack Layton is launching a ..

has a URL pointing to: (broken into 3 lines to solve formatting issues)

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/pageclick?client=ca-gmail&type=1&
redir_url=http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html
%3Fid%3Dd7e600a2-5817-48cf-a902-015cb247c737%26k%3D49477

What program do these news companies use to get these ads? Is this a custom offering by Google where news sources can automatically attach keywords to their stories to trigger links in the ‘Related Pages Section’? How are these paid? Or has this been in existence for a long time already, and I just don’t know about it?

I wouldn’t mind learning more about this. For regularily updated news-type sites, this could be a great way to get relevant, interested readers, better than even ‘normal’ Adwords advertising. Please, comment if you have seen these before!