Nov
29
Best Practices in White Hat Forum Poaching
Filed Under Forums | Leave a Comment
Forum poaching is not exactly considered “best practices” or “white hat” around forums, in fact it’s considered to be kind of a “black hat” practice and generally looked upon as rather sleazy.
http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20772
What’s interesting in the bashing/whining thread
is that there were no “examples” or “references” or even URLs posted. Just kind of a “come onna my house” pity party.
Looking through posts of the past few days, it appears there was a bit of a ruckus going on in this one concerning disagreement about the Supplemental index
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=8823
which PhilC seems to have straightened out rather nicely.
Nov
18
All can now invite AdSense advertisers
Filed Under Google | Leave a Comment
Posted today on the AdSense Blog
Gain more advertisers right from your site
Many of you have been asking for the ability to sign up advertisers directly from your pages. Starting now, you can do just that with Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up. Using this feature, your ad units will display an ‘Advertise on this site’ link that takes interested advertisers to a landing page where they can quickly create an AdWords account and ad targeting your site. Ads created through this channel will automatically target your site and only your site. More advertisers competing for your ad space means more revenue for you.
With customization instructions here on how to implement the code.
So what it adds up to is recruiting AdWords customers for advertising on the content network. There’s no bounty or commission offered apparently, so I guess it prevents Google from being considered being a merchant in the affiliate marketing business. 
There’s some heated discussion on this at WebmasterWorld, hot on the must_read list for today. As incrediBill points out, we’re opted in for it by default - seen at the bottom of our Account page.
I’ve already opted out, as usual taking a wait and see view of everything until more facts are in. Meantime, I see no sense to it as far as there being an advantage for us as publishers.
Nov
15
Holiday Rant: Poison Words for Adsense
Filed Under Google, Rants | Leave a Comment
As good as AdSense targeting is, what I’ve found over time is that there are certain words that act as POISON WORDS and can kill targeting on some site pages, even if those words appear nowhere on the pages, but simply are included in the global navigation of a site. It doesn’t matter if those happen to be higher priced advertising words - if they’re way off they just plain look silly and are a useless distraction.
There’s no doubt that it’s time to give a try at Section Targeting and if that doesn’t work for those pages, just not run AdSense on them at all.
Nov
5
There’s been some speculation as to why Google Adsense would be paying $1 a head for referrals who install Firefox with Google Toolbar.
In addition, if you are a U.S. publisher, for Firefox with Google Toolbar referrals we will pay up to $1 per referral the first time a user installs Firefox. (We hope to make this available soon to international publishers.)
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/11/have-you-heard.html
There can be no other logical conclusion I can think of but that they want to increase the usage of Firefox with the toolbar enabled for prefetching purposes.
What is “results prefetching,” and how does it impact my site?
On some searches, Google uses a special tag supported by Firefox and Mozilla to instruct the browser to download the top search result before the user clicks on the result. When the user clicks on the top result, the destination page will load faster than before. This tag is only inserted when it is likely that the user will click on the first link.
For example, when a Firefox user searches for [stanford], Google includes the following tag in the results HTML:
link rel=”prefetch” href=”http://www.stanford.edu/”
The official Mozilla Link Prefetching FAQ describes the behavior of this tag in detail.
Prefetching may impact your site because the prefetch request will happen whether or not the user clicks on the result, so it may result in additional traffic to your web server. Google only inserts this tag when there is a high likelihood that the user will click on the top result, but clearly this heuristic is not right 100% of the time.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#prefetching
It’s my guess that there may be a saving in processing costs over the long haul, aside from all sorts of statistical benefits for them.