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| In a recent web content for one of our clients, I sang paeans to Google Adsense earnings' potential. In particular, I was referred to an article in USA Today that showcased instances of substantial Google Adsense earnings by website owners for whom Google's doles are like god-sent (never mind Google's own skyrocketing revenue from Adsense). Since I was constrained by my client's need to write on virtues of Adsense while authoring his web content, I couldn't focus on 'allegedly' darker sides of Adsense. I say 'allegedly' because it is not clear whether Google really is the culprit as made out to be. Be that as it may, let me turn to what a few website owners faced while trying to claim a pie of Google Adsense earnings. Stas Bekman's story Stas started publishing Adsense ads on his website from December, 2005. His site was already receiving 600 page-views a day, so Stas thought Adsense ads would be ideal to put his site-estate to perfect use. Since Adsense delivered highly targeted ads, there was always a chance that his viewers would click on the ads resulting in revenues for both Stas and Google. He was not off the mark in his assumption. The ads displayed on his website did generate clicks, and on one day the number of clicks surged to 169. This generated Stas's Google Adsense earnings of $32 on a single day. The 'WOW' however didn't last long. Google came hotfooted and charged Stas of generating invalid clicks from his website, suspending his account promptly. Whatever his Google Adsense earnings were at the time of suspension also stood withdrawn. Since Stas didn't pull down the ads immediately though they were of no use to him for the time being, it remained unclear as to who earned the commission money for the clicks generated during this period. Stas got going immediately and after a series of email correspondence, his account was finally restored by Google a few days later. Stas apparently agreed that deliberate clicks (click fraud) triggered the episode (which Google too said). But the question remained as to who did that? As it turned out, Stas had to forego $30 of his Google Adsense earnings. He didn't mind. He reasoned that for all its supposed follies, Adsense does fetch money for his website. What has Stas got to say on his experience? Taste this: “ Click here to read Stas Bekman's story. Benjamin Cohen's account A similar experience is reflected in Benjamin's account. In his case, after Adsense earnings stopped for him for the first time, Benjamin waited awhile and applied afresh. He got a new account but that too was terminated by Google for alleged 'click fraud'. Though he gives a fair measure of his Google Adsense earnings each time his account operated, Benjamin fails to mention anything regarding number of clicks or whether there were anomalies in them. After going couple of times through Benjamin's article, I concluded that more information would be needed to know what exactly happened. Benjamin complains about the VAT payments but that is something not directly related to Google Adsense earnings per se. Benjamin Cohen's account can be reached here. The truth The truth must lie between what Stas and Benjamin faced and the policies of Google Adsense. Let me turn to what Google has to advise on Adsense. To be sure, Google has lined up many success stories that range from health website to home improvement site to even one that deals in aircraft seating information for frequent flyers. If you feel intrigued, there's perhaps a reason or two there. The common thread is the fact that many site-owners do have bulging Google Adsense earnings. Speaking on behalf of Google, its reluctance to spell out all that we want to know is understandable, given the fact that the contextual advertising scene is becoming very competitive with each passing day. Having said that, I want to echo Stas's wish of having more control on Adsense account. In the least, let Google automatically filter self-clicks and not count them for revenue. YPN (Yahoo! Publisher Network) is already doing that. Why Google cannot is a mystery. If Google takes care of this small scruple, it'll make life easy for many site owners like Stas and Benjamin. Summing up Perhaps Google has reasons to act against Stas and Benjamin like it did. Perhaps not. Is the reason attempted click fraud? If so, what about their insistence that they didn't do what Google says they did? Even as the debate continues, let there be no doubt that the lure of handsome Google Adsense earnings is too much for small website owners to not abstain from opting for it. | ||
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| Google finally released Google Notebook today. Google Notebook is a resource provided that allows you to take notes on web sites that you visit. You can mark your notes as private or share them with the rest of the world. You can compare this to delicio.us, furl, stumbleupon, etc. as a recent way in the past to help increase your web site rankings that would provide links to your web site. However, because of new developments there is another stronger reason to consider these options. With the Google BigDaddy update, resources point to the development of enhancing searches by what people 'bookmark' and take 'notes' to be a stronger ranking factor than in the past! With the greater number of pages being indexed it is becoming harder to rank web sites according to traditional methods. Google is actively pursuing ways to make the searches more accurate using users input, in ways such as Google Notebook for example. Matt Cutts of Google has an in depth blog on BigDaddy that enlightens this point. The BigDaddy Blog can be found here. Here are a couple of excerpts from the blog describing what BigDaddy function is. When you compare it to the recent development of Google Notebook and other services out there such as furl, stumbleupon, and delicio.us you can see how having your web site getting 'note'ed, 'bookmarked', 'furl'ed, and 'stumbled upon' can help with your rankings. "If your page is showing up as supplemental one day and then as a regular result the next, the most likely explanation is that your page is near the crawl fringe. When it’s in the main results, we’ll show that url. If we didn’t crawl the url to show in the main results, then you’ll often see an earlier version that we crawled in the supplemental results. Hope that helps explain things...Google is less likely to give those links as much weight now. That’s the simple explanation for why we don’t crawl you as deeply, in my opinion." "You ask “I’m wondering how you gain relevant links, in some sectors, without reciprocating, or paying? Do you believe that rivals would give you a free one way link, lol?” My answer is that trying to force your way up to the top of search engines is in many ways not working in the most efficient way. To the degree that search engines reflect reputation on the web, the best way to gather links is to offer services or information that attract visitors and links on your own. Things like blogs are a great way to attract links because you’re offering a look behind the curtain of whatever your subject is, for example." Google believes, as do I, that if we get more user input on if a web site is more valuable we can use that information to get more accurate search results. The 'votes' used in the past to rank a site valuable was done with links. The 'votes' used NOW to rank a site valuable are done with Google Notebook, delicio.us, furl, etc. (Although I strongly believe that linking will still remain a very strong point for ranking.) In the past it was only a matter of time before people learned how to abuse the linking 'votes' by creating linking farms. Google combated this by taking link age, link number on the same page, linking relevance, linking from the same IP address, linking source, etc. to weed out the cheating links from the genuine links. With this new way of ranking how valuable a web site is by personal notes, votes, stumbleupons, etc. dawns a new age on optimizing web sites. Soon people will think of ways to 'cheat' the system. Hopefully, Google will be ready for the 'cheaters' out there with this new way of adding value to a site and I hope that this will bring more accurate search engine results. But like an ancient proverb, "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it!" I may find my ranking in Google in the top 5 for 'seo consultation' to drop because of this! | ||
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Make no mistake. You can't escape death, taxes, or spam. The only thing you can do is try to reduce spam and prevent spammers from getting your email address *easily*. The following briefly explains why this is, and offers a balanced solution to make getting your email address as difficult as possible for spambot harvesters, while still making your site friendly for users. Perhaps just a little bit tougher? Actually, it's almost impossible for a spammer to get it. The script above isn't the real barrier. It's every other script on the Internet. If a spammer wants to get that address, their spambot email harvester must parse every single JavaScript on every page that they scan, and this costs processing power. What are the chances that a script contains an email address? Not very good. It's a total waste of time when there are already so many other people that don't protect their email addresses. I've written a simple free utility, the Renegade Email Protector, that obfuscates email addresses 4 different ways: 1) JavaScript Hybrid The first approach is simple for anyone to modify as it is human readable. It inserts random garbage into the email address and strips it out when someone hovers their mouse on the link: When a user then clicks, the RenegadeFix4E8tXtGz function has already replaced the garbage that's inserted into the address to reveal the correct address. Spambots will easily get "johndoe@4E8tXtGzdomain.com" out of it, but who cares? That wrong address will just waste their time. 2) Unicode Encoded (Entities) The second approach encodes the email address in unicode entities and looks like this: While a browser will easily decode the entities there and display the correct address, none of the spambots tested were able to do this. While not my first choice for protecting email addresses, this can easily be put in a noscript tag for visitors that do not have JavaScript enabled (see below). Unfortunately, this approach, like the next two, is not human readable and is extremely tedious if you're typing individual addresses while reading off of a chart. 3) JavaScript Obfuscation The third simply obfuscates the HTML with the mailto link. It's not human readable, but your browser can easily understand it. Your browser then understands that as 'John Doe'. Underneath that, the escaped text is just a simple function that uses 'document.write' to display the proper HTML in your browser. 4) Obfuscated JavaScript Hybrid Lastly, the ofuscated JavaScript hybrid uses a similar script to #1 above then escapes it as in the third method above: It is divided into 2 parts that are both required to get the proper address. (For the mathematicians out there: The order of complexity is linear and not a change in magnitude. Never-the-less, of the many spambots tested, none were able to harvest any email addresses from anything except the first script where the wrong address was harvested. A change in order of magnitude becomes a moot point if even simple examples can't be handled properly. i.e. The exercise is only academic.) To further make things difficult, you can take the JavaScript and put it in a *.js file then call it from the page like so: Just remember to strip the '' tags when you save the script in the file. Finally, for those visitors that do not have JavaScript enabled in their browser, you can use the unicode encoded method between noscript tags as follows: While more complex algorithms could be designed, the above 4 methods work sufficiently to protect email addresses from spambot email harvesters. | ||
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Before I start collecting feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, I want to talk a little bit about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc. so that we’re all on the same page.
Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
Q: Is there anything else I can do?
Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?
Q: I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head?
Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?
Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?
Q: I have some pages in the supplemental results that are old now. What should I do? That’s about all I can think of for now. I’ll try to talk about some examples of 302’s and inurl: soon, to help make some of this more concrete. | ||
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| Any SEO fact finding mission will inevitably lead to reports from webmasters on how Google doomed or saved their website. True to human nature, those who feel hard done by are most often the loudest of the talkers. For every report of how Google has lavished a website with tens of thousands of visitors there are probably ten, a hundred or even more reports of how Google have doomed sites to failure. Persuading Google To Respect Your Site In all honesty, a webmaster that is looking for search engine success must gently persuade Google to love them. The rewards for doing so are far greater than any other form of advertising or marketing. Conversely, the punishment for sites left out in the cold by Google really is enough to break the soul of any webmaster. The Google Effect According to statistics, Google received 91 million American searches per day in the month of March 2006. Their closest rival, Yahoo, managed 60 million and MSN, in third place racked up only 28 million searches per day in the same period. It would be foolhardy to ignore other search engines but to ignore the 43% Google market share is outright online suicide and persuading Google that your site offers everything their visitors want will inevitably give you advantage with the remaining search engines too. The Most Important Point OK, so this is hardly breaking news – after all, every SEO site on the Internet harps on about Google being the be all and end all of online marketing but it is a vitally important point that you must pay attention to. One of the major contributing factors for Google’s success is trust. So many billions of people regularly use Google to search because they trust the results will be as close to relevant as is virtually possible. There is no way to financially hammer your way to the top of the listings and even the sponsored listings at the side of the page are quite clearly listed as exactly that. Remember this point: Google has become successful by providing relevant results to their visitors and they reward websites for doing the same. Understanding Google Algorithms The exact science behind Google algorithms are as much of a mystery as the whereabouts of your missing socks but there are certain factors that all good SEOs and webmasters know. The right amount of relevant content and a clean design indicates a useful website. Tricks and underhand SEO tactics are a thing of the past. They are best left to webmasters who know no better. That’s not to say there aren’t guidelines you should follows to ensure a greater success for your site. However, SEO guidelines are beginning to merge with visitor optimization tactics. Love Your Visitors Including “keywords” is still vital but not to set percentages. The inclusion of keywords makes the reading of your content easier for your visitors and has the added benefit that it also signifies a topic for your website making it easier for Google to assess it’s relevance. Similarly, a clean and simple website design is easy on the eye and quick to navigate for visitors and Google spiders can easily crawl your website. So, in order to optimize your website for Google you should primarily optimize for visitors. Give It A Little Time This neatly brings us to the question of the Google sandbox. This name has been given to the phenomenon that Google essentially ignore websites for the first few weeks of their inception. Clearly, this is an irritant to many webmasters and one of the least understandable parts of their algorithms. The principle behind the action is to ensure that brand new sites don’t pay for thousands of inbound links and propel themselves to the top of the rankings illegitimately. Google have always strived to ensure that links are gained organically based on the relevance and strength of a website and its content. Purchasing links completely bypasses this and, in Google’s opinion, degrades the value of linking. What To Do The next time you sit down to promote a website with the view of increasing your standings within the search engine results remember that ignoring Google because you’ve read bad press from other webmasters is a dangerous choice. Google is, by far, the most widely used search engine on the web and “optimizing” your site to climb the ranks is easier than many would have you believe. Among the key ingredients is fresh, original content that is useful to your visitors. In order to build up links to your website, the submission of articles to article directories is one tactic that shows positive results. | ||
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