I'm in two minds about the Amazon context links myself. They're on as a trial to see what happens but, so far, it's a matter of pence income. I'm also none too keen on the way that they look like proper links but aren't.
The adsense appears all over because one or two areas of the site aren't enabled as yet. Coming fairly soon is the regional guide feature which will push the ads down somewhat. That also happens when I add more regions as you can see on the B&B listing sister site. In due course, I'll be replacing the right hand adsense column with entries taken from the listings sites.
Well.... as it happens Whole Earth is listing quite well on google on searches. Number two on "giants causeway pipe" on google.co.uk for example. Granted, I'm sure that's not a fantastically popular search but still pretty good going for a site registered under a month ago and for which there's been no promotion as yet.Mind you, you'll need to think about the design AND concept if you want to compete with the likes of World Reviewer
What I'll be doing in due course (sometime pre-Christmas probably) is to start cross-linking the accommodation listings sites with the guide which should take up the traffic somewhat.
Actually, the one thing that'll probably take the traffic up the most is what I did this morning which is to copy a couple of the expat banking topics from foreign perspectives to whole earth. You'd be amazed at how popular the one on opening a bank account in America as a non-resident is!
Incidently, does anyone have any idea how google pagerank works on the likes of blogs? Although the homepage of foreign perspectives is PR4, I've noticed that what appears to be a considerable number of category pages are also at PR4 and indeed a number of individual posts have a higher PR than I would have expected.
Arnold