Archive for October, 2007
October 16th, 2007 at 06:57pm
Under Uncategorized
Google is actively behind those that do not offer great value to advertisers. I have just seen this news in Google’s AdSense blog:
We’ve recently made a change to help make sure that the conversions generated by referral ads are valid. For some publishers who display referrals for non-Google products, the earnings you receive for the ad may now be less than the maximum referral value displayed for that ad. This is because our system will initially place a restriction on referral earnings as we monitor click and conversion data to determine that the conversions generated are valid. Once this validation period ends, you’ll begin earning the maximum value of the conversions as displayed in your account.
In short, you get penalized for displaying others ads, and a good technical reason is provided 
The issue behind it is even more serious: there are a lot of sites out that that make their living out of riping AdWords advertisers. Those sites have little or no content and trick users into clicking ads, for example by not providing any navigation except the ad links. Google doesn’t like that for a good reason and is actively looking into ways to avoid it. This seems to be the newest step, with a nice financial side-effect for Google.
The bottom line is that it pays to do a quality site with good content.
By Rainer
October 11th, 2007 at 10:10am
Under Uncategorized
There is an interesting post on making money online with a network of blogs. The idea is quite simple and it also looks like it is not too hard to do. On the other hand, why does it work then? In any case, I find it worth reading and so I blog:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=508563
By Rainer
October 10th, 2007 at 05:44pm
Under Uncategorized
I have now converted my site to WordPress, so that I have better control over how things work. The best part of it was the extremely easy and powerful import function from blogger. It was a great relief to see all post, including comments, back online here (even though this is a small blog).
What was not preserved were most of the permalinks. For a larger blog, that will probably give a big headache. For this small one here, I’ve just created a couple of redirects.
I have now downloaded and (surprisingly easy) installed an AdSense optimized theme. That was one of the drivers behind my change. I have to say it works well. Of course, there is much room for improvement, but I don’t intend to do everything on one day. It will be interesting to see if there is any impact in regard to the ad clicks (though, again, my volume is probably too low to get useful stats out of it…).
By Rainer
October 10th, 2007 at 10:31am
Under edu+ pr
Many people seem to think that a link from a .edu domain offers much more value than a link from any other site. I have even seen people hunting to find places where they can post a link to their site on a .edu domain. Some even pay for it. And some clever folks use their .edu blogs to make good money online.
So what’s all about this? Is an .edu link actually so valuable? Most probably: no. The myth has something to do with the way Google calculates page rank. This algorithm is kept secret by Google, but is is fair enough to say that the number of inbound links is very important as is the age of the URL in question.
Now think about how the Internet was created. Right after the forces, who gave birth to it, universities expanded it. And when the web was born, the first web sites were, of course, universities sites (even Google started as an university project, do you remember?). All of them being hosted at very long-lasting .edu domains. Moreover, these domains (and their sub-domains) are quite stable. There is no need to find new “sexy” domain names, so the .edu folks stay with names following their organizational structure, which is quite stable (at least more stable than commercially-attractive names). Also, .edu admins strongly believe in the “don’t break an URL” rule (don’t move an URL because otherwise some piece of information would become inaccessible). As such, .edu URLs are sometimes very old. So when it comes to persistence of URLs, typical .edu content weighs heavy.
Also, typical .edu content like research papers is cited very often (after all, that’s why it is created). And it is cited in other research papers, of course. The same holds true for other content, even being online discussions and other not-meant-for-eternity content. The bottom line is that typical .edu content has many backlinks from highly relevant sites. It is no surprise that Google assigns high PR to such pages.
Besides that, typical .edu pages do no bad tricks like keyword cloaking, gateway pages and all the other things search engines dislike. Their content is typically very technical and well to spider. If often uses proper titles, and section header (<H1>, <H2>, …) tags. That makes it easy for the search engine to grasp what it is about. That also makes it easy to grasp that the network it is in is indeed highly relevant.
All in all, typical .edu content is the perfect example that “content is king“, that you will get good ranking if you have good content. Think about it.
But what does that mean for the average Joe who wants to monetize his web site? If .edu sites are so well ranked, then, hey, it must be very valuable to be linked from there.
One important thing to remember is that page rank is page rank and not site or domain rank! Google assigns rank to a specific page (URL). It doesn’t matter if the domain’s home page has high PR. What is important is the PR of the page that is linking to yours!
So of course it helps if you manage to get a link from the homepage of, let’s say, the University of California in Berkley. But it doesn’t help as much if you get a link from a student blog, for example at http://smartone.blog.example.berkley.edu/paid-links.html - so I wouldn’t invest any money to be listed there.
And why doesn’t it help? Because it is no typical .edu content! It is low quality content as found on many sites (except, of course, if the student is really bright ;)).
So if you are offered an .edu link, think twice. First of all, it, too, can get you into a “bad neighborhood” and negatively affect your page rank. Secondly, if the page that is linking to you doesn’t have a high page rank, there is no real value in being linked from there (except, of course, that a link never hurts).
The bottom line is that I wouldn’t invest any more time or money into .edu links than on links from any other top level domain. If it is easy to find and free, go for it. If it is hard to do or expensive but the page has high page rank or traffic potential (page rank is not everything!), consider it seriously.
Just don’t jump on any .edu page just because it is .edu!
By Rainer
October 9th, 2007 at 09:51am
Under adsense
I just read an interesting post in Google’s AdSense blog. Google is introducing so-called video units. You can now place select utube videos on your site and get paid for doing so. I have already seen a view of these utube videos on the web. What I saw looks much like the usual TV commercial. I guess it will not only influence web site monetization, but the overall way the web is experienced (be it for good or bad…).
The new feature is a very interesting move. In fact, it resembles the traditional broadcast model, where the broadcaster is paid some money for distributing the ad. I wonder if that also means utube will share some of its income with the creators of quality video. I am asking this, because I assume ads will most probably be embedded into quality content, so that people actually watch the video.
I’ll see…
Google Announcement: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/10/introducing-video-units.html
By Rainer
October 8th, 2007 at 08:34am
Under adsense+ adwords
I tried to use AdWords to drive traffic to my blog, in turn generating AdSense revenue. By now, I know that this practice is somewhat in doubt and Google doesn’t really like it. However, as my blog contains original content, it was probably OK to do so - even Google itself buys traffic, so why shouldn’t I?
But… When I started the experiment, I thought that it would not make much sense. And in fact, this proved true. I can see some search clicks and I can also see increased traffic from them. Also, I can see increased AdSense clicks, which I think are related to the previous AdWords klicks. But: I spent more on AdWords than I got revenue with AdSense. Of course, my experiment has limited scope and my keywords are not very competitive. But all in all, it looks like the AdWords game seems to not work well. However, it is a great way to drive in traffic to a new site. And if it has content and maybe something to sell besides AdSense, then it will for sure make sense.
By Rainer
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:37am
Under adsense+ mfa
I just found an interesting article on MFA (”Made for AdSense”) sites on the web. It basically shares my concerns about this artificial traffic source. Also, google seems to go after it, so it is probably not a business model you would like to pursue if you’d like to stay in business for a longer period of time…
http://www.seonewsblog.com/google-goes-after-mfa-sites-with-adsense-arbitrage
The post tells that a large number of AdSense publishers got banned by Google for using MFA sites.
By Rainer
October 1st, 2007 at 10:53am
Under adsense+ adwords
I have just enabled AdSense inside the picture gallery of my personal site. The gallery is mostly about astronomy, space and some other definitely non-adult themes. As a reminder: AdSense is Google’s program for publishers that enables them to show relevant ads on their site and thus get paid a little bit for their hard work.
When we enabled AdWords, the result was stunning: there were a lot of softcore pr0n ads (or other “soft” adult oriented sites). After quick thinking, the solution was very clear: AdSense, in absence of better information, uses the URL for guessing keywords. And in the URL, there was the term “gallery” (pointing to the gallery module). Now, for Google was everything clear: if it is a gallery, the site must be adult-oriented. And if you know Google, you know that any such matching is based on usage stats. In other words: the average Internet (search) users associates the term “gallery” with adult-oriented material. Do you like some evidence? Sure, just see this screenshot below (click image for a better-to-read hi-res version):
As you can see, the picture was all about technical things, related to space shuttle processing.
Thankfully, Google’s AdSense crawler was quite quick. After a 15 minutes or so, relevant ads begun to appear and the adult-oriented ones were no longer seen. Check yourself and try out today’s relevant ads for that very same page:
http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery-sts120-pic-sts_120_vab_no_mlp.phtml
The bad news, though, is that AdSense seems to crawl quickly only pages that are being accessed. So I now need to either access all of my gallery content or need to life with the fact that for a couple of days people will get, well, confusing ads. I hope, however, that AdSense will crawl the rest of the site now so that this is only a temporary problem. Anyhow, I need to keep an eye on it (if you look at my site, I guess you fully understand why I don’t like these adult-oriented ads to be on it).
If everything else fails, I’ll filter out ads in my AdSense account, but this is only a last resort thing to do, as it is
a) a lot of work
b) prone to error
Issue b) is especially problematic as new ads pop up every day, so you need to keep everything updated - IMHO nothing that you can really manage to do. So it is also in Google’s best interest to keep things relevant. After all, I’d need to remove the ads if I can’t find a way to permanently get such ads out of my site.
In any case, to me it is an interesting find that “gallery” seems to be associated with adult-oriented content for the average Internet user…
Side note: I first found the effect on the gallery home page (at http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery.phtml. Due to the size of that page, I could not create a screen shot. So I used an actual picture instead, where the effect can be neatly shown (see above). It is also noteworthy that other urls clearly showed Google used the URL content for keyword targeting. For example, there is a section on the strut repair done at space shuttle Discovery (on STS-120 mission). These URLs contain the word “strut” in them. Not surprisingly, all ads were about mechanical things. There were other samples, too. So there a clear relationship between the URL and the ads. After the AdSense crawler has crawled the page, actual page content is used for targeting. And it seems to crawl pages rather quickly (well done, Google…).
By Rainer