May 7, 2008 Archives

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: May 7, 2008"

A few weeks ago, I ran a poll asking Which Day Do You Make Most Your Google AdSense Income?

We now have 92 responses, over the course of the week and most people voted that Monday they earned the most revenue on average from Google AdSense. Note that this is a very small sampling. I am not surprised that Saturdays and Fridays are the smallest earning days for publishers (being a publisher myself). I am a bit surprised by the Thursday response, but again, this is a small sampling.

Here are the results:

:: Monday - 24 responses - 26%
:: Tuesday - 18 responses - 20%
:: Sunday - 14 responses - 15%
:: Wednesday - 12 responses - 13%
:: Thursday - 8 responses - 9%
:: Friday - 8 responses - 9%
:: Saturday - 8 responses - 9%

Forum discussion continued at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Groups thread has a long discussion on how Google defines what a link farm is or is not. I have decided to isolate a Googler's comment, because who can best define what Google feels a link farm is, better then a Google employee?

JohnMu, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, posted twice in the thread. The second time he offered additional advice on how he would define a link farm. He said:

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself "would I be doing this (linking there) if search engines didn't exist?"

Another way of looking at it is to think about where and how you will be linking: Do you feel fine with linking to that site with a highlighted link in your main content or would you rather have the link in 5pt gray on white in the footer? Do you want your visitors to see and use it or is it just for the search engines?

John also links to the Google link schemes page which has the official line on bad linking. Now, of course there is gray area and that is where John's post above comes into play. Even with that, people still may be confused. Well, if it feels wrong - then it might be.

John admits, even him being a Googler, it is still "hard for [him] to provide a definition of what Google sees as that."

If you need more clarification or have specific questions, you can join the Google Groups thread and hopefully be aided in the right direction.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Honestly, I am not sure if this is brand new, but a DigitalPoint Forums thread reports the Large Rectangle (336 x 280) unit as having four text ads within it as new.

Here is a screen capture of the ad unit:

A typical ad unit looks like what you see listed on the Google AdSense ad formats page. I.e. four lines of ads and not four boxes of ads. Here is a live ad from my AdSense account for testing purposes:

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A WebmasterWorld member says that his .com, which has a UK IP address (and is for the United Kingdom audience), is not being recognized as a UK-specific site even though he updated Google Webmaster Tools and informed Google of the geographic location of the site. He ranks #5 in Google.com but #149 in Google.co.uk. (For reasons like this, I just wish .co.uk was the default domain in Google and that there wasn't a landrush for .com domains out there. I want tamar.com one day, and they're a UK company.) ;)

Why is this ranking occurring? There are a few reasons. While the site is UK centric, the links to the site may be from other foreign countries. The idea, then, is to get more UK links.

One forum members suspects that it may be something else, because in the past, Google has misidentified some UK IP addresses on generic .com TLDs. Furthermore, some UK hosting companies are actually not hosting in the UK.

While some forum members think that WHOIS information is at fault, that's not the case when these domains are protected by WhoisGuard or Domains by Proxy. There must be other factors in play here.

One final suggestion from a forum member comes from checking DMOZ rankings (if applicable) and ticking off the checkbox that says "this is a UK listing." Since Google uses DMOZ for data, this can't hurt at all.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Starting at about 5am (EST) yesterday, I have been noticing reports in the forums about Google being slow to update both the AdSense reports and the AdWords reports. The two largest threads discussing the issues can be found at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups, but there are plenty of other threads throughout the forums with complaints.

Again, first reports came in at about 5am (EST) yesterday and the issues have still not been resolved. We do have reassurance from Google in the WebmasterWorld and Google Groups threads that the issue is only reporting related and all the data is being tracked. When the reporting issues are fixed, it will show correct data.

AdSenseAdvisor posted at WebmasterWorld saying:

Thanks for your comments and your patience, and apologies for the delay. Our engineering team is working to address this issue as soon as possible. Please be assured that your account statistics have still been tracked, and we are working on displaying them in your account.

I will be sure to post with any additional updates.

AdSensePro Stephanie posted twice in the Google Groups thread (and other Google Groups threads) saying:

I've escalated your reports to our engineers, and they're currently investigating the issue. I'll be sure to update this thread as soon as I have any more info -- thanks for your patience in the meantime.

She then added a little bit later:

I've just received an update from our engineers: they're still working on resolving the issue, but they have confirmed that no statistics or data have been lost from your accounts. I'll let you know when I have more info about when you might expect to see updated stats. Again, we appreciate your patience.

The WebmasterWorld thread has over a 130 posts, and the Google Groups thread has almost a 100 posts.

In addition, you can see the brand new AdSense Known Issues page for an update that shows the issue is still not resolved, as of 7:45am (EST) today.

Forum discussion on both the AdWords and AdSense side at the following threads:

• Google Groups - AdSense
• WebmasterWorld - AdWords
• WebmasterWorld - AdSense
• Search Engine Watch Forums - AdSense
• DigitalPoint Forums - AdSense
• DigitalPoint - AdSense

RustyBrick, the company that runs Search Engine Roundtable, is pleased to announce that we finished launching the infrastructure of Storybids, a really unique service offering that enables video producers to monetize their videos through product placement techniques. In other words, those who want to get products some product placement exposure are now able to connect directly with video producers to advertise their product through the Storybids auction platform. Here's how it works.

It's a really neat idea and RustyBrick is really glad that we were part of implementing the backend and working with a really cool guy like Joe Morin who is quite popular in the SEM community.

Message from Barry: The reason we are covering this is twofold. (1) Most of the people involved in Storybids.com are from the SEM community and we would like to help the SEM community in any way we can. (2) RustyBrick, my company, built the core technology behind the company - so I want that disclosure to be out there.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yahoo has announced on its blog that since security is so important, together with McAfee, Yahoo has launched SearchScan to protect web surfers from sites that contain malicious software such as viruses or software and spam.

If you do a search for a phrase like "screensaver," you'll see the tool in action:

While the solution is great for security, forum members wonder why the questionable results have to be indexed at all. There are a few possible answers to this scenario, including the possibility that the site can be mistakingly flagged as dangerous if there are enough reports about it. This solution instead lets the web owner see it before it's taken off the results completely and gives some information into what could be causing the warning.

Malware reviews aren't new. Google has had the feature since the beginning of 2007. It's very good for Yahoo surfers that they get the added security as well.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.