It’s self-evident, isn’t it - slap an advert, or several, bang in the middle of the viewport and increase your ROI or CPM or any acronym you care to name… or is it?

Yes, if you have a well-established site, lots of backlinks, stable traffic, then the positioning will play a predictable part in the metrics of it - the stuff about eye movements makes perfectly good sense. But if you’re not a super-powered problogger what then? How many visitors take one look at the PPC, get the distinct impression they’ve arrived at a MFA niche site and close, never to return again?

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The usual vague imprecations here, this time about the use of Chinese teenagers to boost traffic just prior to trying to sell a site at Sitepoint.

Impressions are certainly spurious if generated by these means, but quite why, in the real world as opposed to the Googleverse, a click is more spurious than one generated by any other means is not made clear. Isn’t it unfortunate that so little is made clear.

But it’s always interesting to see a site with toolbar PR 1 and Alexa rank 14,000.