Here's something strange. Maybe some of you have seen this problem too. For some reason, my Adsense 728×15 link unit on my dad blog is not working correctly. As you can see in the screen shot below, it's showing part of an Amazon ad where the link unit is normally shown.

The Adsense link unit works fine when there are relevant ads, but when there are no relevant ads, Google shows an alternate ad I created for a different blog. I'm not sure why. I didn't set it up to do that. To make matters worst, the alternate ad it shows is a 300×250 ad so only part of the ad shows up. Here's the odd part. It displays the alternate ad even though I selected the option to fill the space with a solid color. The same thing happens when I select the option for public service ads.

I emailed Google about the problem last week, but so far they have not been able to duplicate the problem. Has anyone else had this problem or am I just going nuts? In the meantime, I removed the Adsense link unit on Daddy Forever.

<shameless-plug> BTW, feel free to enter my contest for free flowers from ProFlowers. Five winners will be selected. Contest ends Saturday. </shameless-plug>

I just noticed something new on my personalized Google home page. As you can see in the graphics below, there are now plus marks next to feed items. If you click on the plus mark, you can see a preview of the feed item.

I'm not sure when Google added this new feature, but it's a nice feature. One of the problems previously was that you could only see the title of the feed item on your personalized Google home page. You had to click on the link and leave the page to see more about the feed item. Now you can see a preview without leaving the page.

However, I did encounter a glitch once. No matter which plus mark I clicked on, I only got a preview of a blank page. After I hit the browser refresh button, everything worked fine again.

I'm not sure, but I think the date and time stamp might be new too. They could have been there before, but I don't remember them.

Matt Cutts has an interesting post about what Google does when it detects a site has been hacked. Apparently, Google actually sends emails to the addresses listed for the site when Google penalizes a site. I have always assumed Google just penalizes sites without bothering to tell people.

What's even more interesting about the post is the site that Matt blogged about. The site was hacked in the very same way my dad blog was hacked…with the exact same porn links…on the exact same date. It appears a bunch of sites got hacked that day. Lucky for me, I took care of the problem within a couple of days. Otherwise, Google would have penalized my site as well.

In my last post, I mentioned I could not figure out how the hack occurred; I didn't see any modifications to my WordPress templates and disabling all my plugins had no affect. I have since discovered the hack occurred in the index.php file that sits outside of my WordPress directory. I'm telling you guys this in case you encounter the same hack in the future. I'm not going to list the hacked code here. The last thing I want to do is get ranked or penalized for porn stuff. You can see the hack code on Matt's post if you are curious.

A reader asked me why my daddy blog has a page rank of six while this site only has a page rank of five. Her theory was that my daddy blog has a higher rank because it's more focused. She's partly correct because if you take a look at the stats below, both sites are very similar. The biggest differences (other than content and design) are number of visitors, RSS readers, and comments.

I use full feeds on both of my sites. This blog has more RSS readers than my daddy blog. I think that's one of the reason why I have fewer visitors to this site. In addition, the type of readers are very different. On this site, I think my readers want to learn and read new posts when I have them. They (you guys) generally do not leave comments. On the other hand, readers on my daddy blog want to be noticed so they leave comments. Most of these visitors probably won't come back often, if at all. Can't really blame them. As parents, we want to infect as many people as we can with stories and pictures of our kids. Once we have infected someone, we don't feel the need to infect them again.

Regardless of page rank, both sites do not generate much in earnings. My daddy blog actually earns less per click than this blog. I guess parenting related ads don't pay as well as Adsense related ads. Obviously, I would like to earn more from these two blogs, but it's not really that important. I see my daddy blog as a time capsule I can share with my kids 5-10 years from now. As for this site, I'm only keeping it warm until my son takes over the domain name. I purchased a domain for each of my kids. Zachary is only three so I probably have another ten years before he takes over the iZachy domain name.

Lost in the stats below, is the quality of the links pointing to my blogs. My guess is that a big reason why my daddy blog has a higher page rank is because some of the sites that link to my daddy blog have very high trust rank. With Google, all links are not created equal. Some sites have higher trust than other sites and can pass higher page rank to the sites they link to.