Google Misses Earnings: Is Anyone Surprised?
It blows my mind that forecasters, including Google’s internal forecasts, did not more clearly take into account the impact that their June attack on arbitrage would have on their earnings. Google, bowing to pressures of general advertisers and searchers, decided to bite the hand that feeds it – the masses of Adsense publishers and Adwords arbitrage experts who poured money into Google. While their campaigns were targeted and only directly affected a handful of publishers and advertisers, the ripple effect (damn those ripple effects) spread throughout the industry sounding the bell tone: “if Google will go after Arbitrage, eventually, they will go after Made-For-Adsense”. I would love to see the defection rate of this past quarter compared...
Google AdPreview Feature Update
Google has now made the ad preview feature MUCH easier to use. Instead of having to manipulate the URL of the page utilizing a ‘cheat sheet’ (which Google has now taken down but you can see below for a general idea…) you can now select from a drop down menu of choices to check the location of you ad/natural listing from almost anywhere in the world. For those of you not familiar with this tool what it does is allow you to check your ad position without incurring impressions. This is great when trying to preserve ad quality as your CTR does not suffer due to anxious repetitive position checks. (I recommend telling your clients to use this feature to check their ads!!) This preservation will help in keeping cost down and positions up. The Old Way...
Prevent Harry Potter Spoilers on Digg with Greasemonkey
So, it is inevitable. Some idiots are going to read the last page of the Deathly Hallows and spout out “Harry Potter Lives!” or “Harry Potter Dies” before the rest of us even get home to pick up the book, much less read it like a real person. In anticipation of these spoilers, I went to look for what I could do to exclude stories by keyword when browsing Digg. (this is also very useful for getting rid of paris hilton and iphone stories, which are growing very tiresome). The solution: Digg Washer. This beauty of a Greasemonkey script makes it very easy to hide stories based on keywords. Unfortunately, it has not been updated since the last Digg revision, so you can either make a slight code change yourself (mentioned in the comments on the...
Bad Stats are Holding Back Web 2.0
I use “stats” generically here because, at its simplest meaning, what is holding back web 2.0 is bad statistical planning. You have to ask the right questions with the right controls to get the right answers so you can make the right recommendations. The napkin business plan generation apparently has not learned its lesson in the web 2.0 sphere, with new sites and communities launching by the dozens. Unfortunately, web 2.0 communities commonly make the following assumption: massive data, regardless of its quality, is sufficient. What we need is a more complete measurements (questions) and common, controlled subjects (wines). To illustrate this point, I would like to identify 3 wine Web 2.0 communities (Corkd – BottleNotes – TasteVine), 2...
Simplest Trick to Optimize Body Content
So, the general rules of thumb for body content are this… Keywords in important tags (h1, h2, h3, b or strong, em, maybe alt tags) Unique content as close to the top of the page as possible. The first issue is quite easy to handle, and has been spammed to death across the internet since the inception of search engines. However, moving unique content to the top of the code while maintaining an attractive, Google-guidelines-compliant page has proven more difficult. Let’s take a look. Headers, advertisements, navigation and more normally precede the really unique content on the page. But how much code and duplicate content does that create? In the case of FindArticles.com, we are looking at nearly 370 lines of code between the body tag and the unique...
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