Posts Tagged ‘155’
Google Adsense appears to be broken
Well, the Adsense team blogged about Adsense being down today, but they apparently miscalculated the amount of time it would take to be back up and running.
Tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm, our engineers will be performing routine system maintenance. You know the drill: you won’t be able to log in to your account during these 4 hours, but rest assured that we’ll keep serving ads to your pages and tracking all clicks and impressions in your account.
4 hours for me has become 8. And now the site is back up, but all it does is continuously reload. I can’t even try to log in…
Kind of a bummer…
After years and years of research, millions of dollars, and hiring of some of the most intelligent people on the web, Google still can’t stop the spam blogs from flooding its index.
This morning I woke up and started searching for information about the Wyoming GOP Caucus. I started with regular search, but the results were old, outdated, and some what irrelevant. Clearly the wonderful live search results I experienced Thursday night during the Iowa Caucus were not running things this morning. I then jumped to Google Blog Search and sorted the results by date.
Here is what I was met with. Continue Reading
Are you one of those bloggers who watches his/her search terms and keywords religiously? Do you constantly seek to know what your readers were searching for when they found you?
Most bloggers, without question, will say YES!
It’s probably safe to say that the majority of us (bloggers) are well aware of our traffic sources. Bloggers like to know who is reading, and we like to know how to improve our site so that more readers land on our posts and pages. But the fact remains that just because we know what keywords are being searched to find us doesn’t mean we know what to do after we gain the data.
So what’s next? How do I improve and what do I need to do to help more readers find my blog?
Ahh… the ultimate question. How do we improve our traffic numbers?
I’ve been analyzing a lot of data and numbers over the past few weeks, and I’ve come to realize that even though our main site (ConservaBlogs.com) is considered a “trusted” site, we’re getting far more traffic from “long tail” keywords then from the head (high profile, extremely competitive keywords).
Some would say we’re not yet being trusted with the “big” keywords. I would assert, however, that we’re actually being trusted more than some of the larger, more elite sites. You see, we’re being given traffic from a more diverse pool of keywords and search terms.
My guess is that a similar scenario is playing out for your blog as well. You might get a couple hundred visits a day, but they’re coming from a wide range of keywords that only send a couple of visits per day, per keyword.
Keep that thought in mind. Let’s jump to another side of the topic for a moment.
The BIG keywords
In my opinion, we’re not giving enough credit to the keywords in the “hit tail”. We’re spending an awful lot of time going after the keywords that can send thousands of visits a day. It makes sense at first thought, but we need to consider it might take months to develop a page worthy of such rankings. Continue Reading
Something we should all be doing…
Obviously, Google likes it when we use image ALT tags, and here Matt Cutts appears suggesting it will help make your site much more search engine friendly.
The RSS feeds this morning have been somewhat lacking in excitement. I’m about 60% through them all and the first post to catch my eye is a post over at impNERD. The post is about a new blogger widget called ScratchBack.
ScratchBack is an online “tipping” system. It allows you, the publisher, to accept tips and “give back” links or images in return.
You name your price on your tips, and you earn money from every interaction through our easy-to-use automated system. It’s free to sign-up, and you can have a TopSpot widget on your website or blog in minutes.
In other words, as I read it, you “tip” a blogger and in exchange you get a link. AKA… text link selling.
But unlike Text Link Ads, Linkworth, and Pay Per Post, ScratchBack is playing by rules of the Google god.
Do My Links Pass Page Rank?
They do not. Every single link, including the link back to Scratchback, in the TopSpot widget has a “nofollow” hard encoded in them. The code is delivered in Javascript format as well. That means that Google and other search engine spiders “won’t follow” the link. I doesn’t mean your link isn’t clickable, it is.You cannot remove that code, nor should you attempt to as per the user agreement every publisher and advertiser agree to upon registration. Google has made it perfectly clear that “selling page rank” is not something they believe in. We don’t believe in it either. This system is built for fun. There are plenty of other solutions out there you can use if you want to “pass Google juice”, just not this one. Did you hear that Google?
So yes, it is a form of link selling. No, it’s not going to be looked down on by Google.
Ever come across something of interest that you feel is worth blogging, but have to ask “do I really want to go log in and get this posted up?”
I certainly have. In fact, it happened today. I came across a post about Matt Cutts and his comments on subdomains vs. subdirectories that I knew would be a great post over at Search Engine Tattler, but at the time didn’t want to jump in to my admin panel and write the post.
It was at this point that I remembered a Firefox addon I used to use, but for some reason stopped using when I switched from Windows to Linux Ubuntu. The plugin is called ScribeFire, and it’s a MUST have for those of us who post across a plethora of blogs.
The plugin creates an icon in the lower right side of your Firefox browser. When you lick on the icon, it opens up a “post window” where you can post to any blog you maintain. Once you create an account and give Scribefire your login details, the script pulls all of your blog data into the Firefox window. You have your pages, your recent posts, your categories, etc.
You can also add tags, and the editor allows for easy access to basic functions such as links, bold, image, etc.
When you hit publish the script automatically uploads everything to your blog. Basically, you can blog from any webpage you visit!
I haven’t tried ScribeFire with blogger, typepad, or wordpress.com, but it works like a charm on all of my hosted Wordpress blogs. If you need the ability to QUICKLY blog from any page you’re viewing, this is an excellent solution and it might be just what the e-doctor ordered.
Blog Herald has a post up about a cash prize contest currently running thanks to an online discounts voucher site out of the UK.
The contest brings nothing new to the table in regards to the idea realm, but it does beg the question… is this the new pay per post? I mean, in the past you might have had a $1,500 budget to buy text links within blog posts via the many online providers. But considering the fact that Google started it’s offensive strike on link sellers, wouldn’t it make since to just hold a contest and give the $1,500 away as Continue Reading
According to a discussion that took place during the Organic Listings Forum here at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Google has issues with product specific pages on shopping sites.
The Organic Listings forum was moderated by Danny Sullivan. The panelists were Mike Grehan, Mark Rosenberg, and Erica Schmidt.
During the Q&A part of the forum someone took the mic and asked about problems his company, Shoplocal.com, was having with product pages that were only good and relevant for a short period of time. This wasn’t so much a question as it was a revelation in one of Google’s struggles to bring timely and relevant information when it comes to search strings related to direct products.
Basically, ShopLocal.com will compare product sales on a local level. For example, if you’re looking for an ipod in Chicago, the site might give you the latest deal from both Best Buy and Circuit City. The problem is, once the deal ends the page remains online and the search engines continue indexing it as if the content never changed.
The keywords Danny Sullivan used to bring up a page on Shoplocal are “chicago ipod”. Sure enough, a shoplocal page came up as the #1 result. But, this page is no longer relevant or useful because the product on sale is no longer on sale and has vanished from the page.
One can certainly argue that chicago ipod is a healthy search term. In fact, I’ve searched for similar keywords myself. So, wouldn’t Google want the user to find timely and relevant information in the #1 spot on the SERP? I mean, I usually get peeved when I click on a result only to find that “this product is no longer available” or “this page has moved”.
Why then does Google continue to rank product pages on shopping sites so high when it is so obvious the content fluctuates? And for the record, this particular product page had changed quite some time ago. Google had plenty of time to re-evaluate the pages’ relevance.
What up with that?
