Using technology to make money online
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Can summarise the changes to Google Adsense for me ?
I get presented with a really long page with all the terms and conditions and all I really want to know is what has changed since the last time.
I’ll keep taking the skip option until I don’t have a choice. Though I have plenty of time. Changes don’t start till the 28th May.
After the first couple of months I stopped reading the adsense optimisation tips that Google automatically sends me each month.
The main reason is that unless your very new to creating websites for money making purposes then they haven’t anything new to tell you.
The other reason is that Google wouldn’t think for a second that there is better ways to make money than stacking your sites with Google products.
I have a funny feeling that the whole idea of killing pagerank for sites selling text links is so that people replace them with Google inventory.
Here’s some of the clever tips that Google provided me this month
Adsense for Search adds both functionality and revenue to your site.
You are not currently using Adsense for Search on your sites.
Okay, I agree to this one, but in the past when I’ve used Adsense for search the revenue has been tiny. So I haven’t bothered to replace the code when I’ve changed themes. If I was getting 10,000 hits a day I may reconsider my position on this one.
Referrals can add incremental revenue to your site.
You are not currently using Referrals on your sites.
Google recently reduced payouts on referrals by massive amounts, I won’t waste my time for the pittance they are offering.
Placing more than one ad unit on a page often generates more revenue.
Many of your sites only contain one ad unit.
I know this, it’s obvious. Though doubling the number of ad units on a page doesn’t always mean double the revenue. I have one site that has a link bar at the top then 3 decent size ad blocks throughout the template. 95% of my Google revenue on that site comes from the link bar.
I know it doesn’t pay to bite the hand that feeds you, but it also doesn’t hurt to check the source and quality of the food before you eat it !
Here’s a large list of Google Page Rank Tools. I had grand plans of linking to every single one I could find, but after a while it was obvious that a lot of them have the same features.
If you’re serious about SEO I recommend taking a look at them and choosing one from each category to add to your book marks.
Multi Data Center Page Rank Checking
These are good to see if a PR update is happening, they look at multiple Google servers and if there is a difference between the PR on the servers then it’s a strong sign that the visible PR is being updated.
Page Rank Prediction
No idea how this one works, I’ll have to wait for the next visible update to see if it’s correct.
Single Data Centers
Most of these sites do the same thing. They return the PR for a given site from a single data center. Some of them offer additional information such as Alexa ranking and backlinks and other stuff you can use to view the progress of your site in the SERP’s.
Some of them check a list of domains at the same time, this is a good way to check a lot of your own sites, or compare them to competitors.
If your just wanting to check a single sites PR fairly regulary then I’d recommend installing a PR tool bar of some sor. (a couple are listed below)
Page Rank Icons (for your website)
These sites will give you some code to put on your website to show your Page Rank to your visitors. Personally I think it’s just a bit of a vanity thing and prefer to use a Page Rank tool bar (see below).
Fake Page Rank Detection
These sites profess to tell if the Page Rank you a seeing for a certain site is fake. I’m not sure how they do it, but that’s the claim they make. It’s probably worth using one of these sites if you’re looking at buying a site based on it’s PR.
Page Rank Toolbars
These are plug-ins for your browser, that constantly show the PR of the pages you are visiting. Anyone developing websites on should have one of these installed. I can personally recommend the Search Status tool bar, very handy. If anyone knows of any for other browsers like Safari or Opera then leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list.
Adding a Page Rank Checker to Your Site
I looked at a whole bunch of scripts on the net that would let you set up a page to show other sites Page Rank. Absolutely none of the demos I tried gave valid results so I’m not going to list them here. If you know of one that works then leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list. However one that looks okay is a service run buy Iwebtool. They have a large range of tools for people running websites and doing SEO. Select the tool you want to use on your own site from the list here then click the “add this on your website” link in the upper right hand part of the screen. You’ll be taken to a page with the code you need to put into your site. The link back to Iwebtool is fairly unobtrusive so don’t feel your selling your soul by linking to another sites services.
And the last useful link
This is not so much a tool as a reference, this site gives a history of Page Rank updates going back to 2000. I’m not sure when it was last updated but it shows that the last visible PR update was 30 April 2007. They estimate that the last update should have happened around July 21, but we’re all still waiting for it to happen.
Well that’s it, I could have made the list a lot longer but of the hundreds I looked at, a lot of them give you the same info and were just a waste of space. If you know of any good Page Rank tools that I’ve missed then leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list.
Most of the interweb gets excited when they notice a Google page rank update going on.
The only real reason this should cause excitement is if your waiting to have all your hard SEO work validated. (oh and it’s not a bad thing if your selling advertising or putting the entire website on the market)
Google is constantly updating your page ranking based on many things. It’s only what’s called the visible page rank that gets updated around four times a year.
So if your slaving away doing heaps of hard work trying to lift your page rank, don’t think you have to wait three or four months to see the result, Google could be elevating your site right now.
A while back Google announced that in an effort to reduce comment spam on blogs that links with the attribute rel=nofollow wouldn’t get any Google juice*. Other search sites seem to pretty much ignore the nofollow tags, I’m not complaining about that at all.
Wordpress implemented a system where links from commenters would automatically have the no follow attribute added to their links.
Moving on a little bit, Wordpress now has a pretty good anti spam system called Askimet. It works pretty well and has reduced my comment spam down to next to zero.
So the question has been raised “Why do Wordpress publishers still need the nofollow tag?”
I decided that I didn’t and have installed the Do Follow plugin on this blog.
So now I’m happily sharing my Google juice with any one that takes the time to post a comment.
Please note that comments that appear to be deliberate attempts at getting Google juice will be deleted, all I ask is that you say something interesting and relevant to the post.
*Google juice is a slang term for backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the higher Google ranks your page in the search results.
It’s that time again when Google does it’s merry little page rank dance. I’m hoping a couple of my sites will increase their pagerank which will help me market them on Text Link Ads
I’ve found Live Page Rank to be a useful tool to check my pagerank. It shows you your page rank at various data centers to give you an idea of where your site will rank once the google dance is completed.
What a lot of people don’t realise is that your pagerank is in a constant state of change and it’s only the visible pagerank that gets updated every three months or so but it’s the visible page rank that your Text Link Ads prices are based on so depending on how your earning your income the update can be important.
Another great little tool I’ve found is Visual Pagerank. It shows you the pagerank of all the links on a given page. It’s handy as a one stop shop to see what pagerank your sites internal pages are.
Text Link Ads are currently offering $100 in free ads for new customers. So if your not currently a customer it might be worth taking them for a test drive to see how they go.
It’s been a bit over a week since I diverted all my email to gmail, I’m still getting a few spams in my inbox each day, but nothing like the volume I had to deal with before.
I did however notice a few false positives in the spam box. Most of them were from marketing mailing lists I’d subscribed to which can quite often have the characteristics of spam so I don’t blame gmail too much.
There’s a few easy fixes to stop them from being marked as spam in the future.
The first is to add the from address to your contact list, you can either do this manually, or when you get an email that is spam you can click on the little down arrow at the right of the email frame and click “add email@email.com to contact list”
Or if your in your spam folder, just mark the email with a tick and click the “not spam” button at the top or bottom of the list.
Plan C is as easy as sending a blank email to whichever address you want to receive the email from. Gmail will automatically place it in your contact list and it will be allowed through in future
I just came across an interesting read at Gigaom hypothosising how Google are working towards becoming a default advertising agency in all forms of media.
Robert Young thinks that the big G is working towards a concept where someone can sit at there desk and buy all the advertising in all the markets that they want.
It’s not a bad theory, check out the full article here.
I’ve had websites online since somewhere around 1999. In the good old days people didn’t think twice about putting their email address on there site and mine was online for quite a while.
The unfortunate thing about this is that spammers use a spider to travel the web and pick up email addresses. One of my accounts averages about 250 emails a day, and about 245 of those are spam.
I’ve tried a couple of different spam filters with varying levels of success. Mailwasher Pro was okay for a while. I liked the fact that I could check the sender and header before deleting the emails off the server. But after a while it lost it’s effectiveness to the point where it was only catching around 20% of the spam I was receiving.
I also tried SpamAssasin, this was much more effective. I’d say it was catching 99% of the spam I was getting. Unfortunately it was marking as spam quite a few emails that were actually important. ie email from my webhosting provider, paypal and the worst of all the registries where I buy my domains. This created a minor disaster when I lost a couple of domains because I never recieved the expiry notice. Though I should say that if I was a slight bit organised then I wouldnt have needed to get the expiry reminder. I tried adding certain domains to the whitelist but I’m not a mind reader and couldn’t be certain where these emails were coming from.
For a while now I’ve been using a gmail account and slowly updating my email addresses at various places to us that account. The spam filter at gmail is spectacularly good and I’m loving it, however there are some services I use that will not accept registration from free email account providers.
So I’ve just started my fourth effort at filtering spam. What I’m now doing is forwarding one of my main email accounts through to my gmail account. This was pretty easy to do through the Cpanel interface that my web host provides.
This domain has been sitting idle for a few years with just a single index page, and through that whole period it had maintained a PR of 2. Not great, but a lot more PR than the brand new domains I’ve been buying for my retirement project.
Now that I’ve been developing the site for the last two weeks my PR has gone to 0. I can’t figure it out, maybe the google dance is still going on.
Anyone else got a theory ?