iZachy » Google

Google Adsense Link Unit Going Goo-Goo

Ken Cheung — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:09:47 +0000

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.

BTW, feel free to enter my contest for free flowers from ProFlowers. Five winners will be selected. Contest ends Saturday.

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New Google RSS Preview

Ken Cheung — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 05:42:01 +0000

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.

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Google Penalizes Hacked Sites

Ken Cheung — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:19:21 +0000

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.

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A Tale of Two Blogs

Ken Cheung — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 08:02:18 +0000

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.

	iZachy	Daddy Forever
Page Rank	5	6
Age	194 days	148 days
# of Links	26,985	28,990
Alexa Rank	222,649	286,291
Page Views (Oct)	15,525	18,578
Visitors (Oct)	2,930	6,866
RSS Readers (average)	41	21
RSS Readers (high)	52	31
# of Posts	64	59
# of Comments	97	121
Adsense Clicks	7	20
YPN Clicks	1	9

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PageRank from Zero to Six

Ken Cheung — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:28:46 +0000

I started my daddy blog about five months ago. Like most new sites, my site was placed in Google's sandbox. My page rank was zero for the first four months. Then just like that, my page rank went from zero to six at the end of September. Actually, my page rank alternates between zero and six because the new page rank has not propogated to all of Google's data centers.

I am happy with my new page rank, but I think it's strange it went from zero to six. What happened to one through five? It seems like my page rank should have been one after the first month, then two, then three, and so on to six. Why does it go directly from zero to six?

The answer is that my page rank didn't actually go directly from zero to six. The PageRank value you see in your Google toolbar is only a snap shot of the actual value. Google only updates their toolbar every few months. Internally, PageRank is computed continuously. Not only is the value computed continously, the value isn't limited to integers. For instance, my PageRank of 6 could actually be 5.64, 5.90, 6.12, or 6.4164.

If you want to read more about PageRank, take a look at Matt Cutts' blog.

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Google News Bot Chokes on Links in Titles

Ken Cheung — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 21:15:20 +0000

Over on SEOmoz is an article on how to increase web traffic with Google News. At first I thought, "oh, another article about getting included into Google News." I figure it was the same stuff I've seen previously elsewhere. Then I saw something that caught my attention:

1. No links in titles
The Google News crawler can't handle links in titles. Run your titles in h tags and include a permalink on the page that the Google News bot can use.

Holy jumping up and down Martha, that can't be right. Can it? After all, on most WordPress themes, the title of each post is a link to itself. I thought for sure Brian, the author of the post, must be wrong so I checked on the Google News site and this is what I found:

…each article must link to a page dedicated solely to that article. When the headline on this page is an active link, however, we may have difficulty displaying it correctly. Making headlines regular text, not links, will increase the likelihood that our crawler will extract the correct headlines.

Good golly Miss Molly, Brian does know what he's writing about. This brings me full circle with a question I had when I first started using a blog platform (I have been using a blog platform for less than a year). One of the things I noticed after installing WordPress was that the title of each post links to itself. I thought it was very odd so I did some research. What I found out was that the title links to itself because it was convenient for the developer to copy the same code over and over. Otherwise, the developer would have to spend more time editing out the links on some pages/templates.

I didn't want the title linking to itself so I removed the link. Then I noticed that just about every blogger had titles linking to the same page. Doubt crept into my mind. I was thinking, "I'm a web 1.0 dinosaur, maybe these web 2.0 bloggers know something I don't know. Maybe having the title linking to itself was great for SEO." So, I went back and reinserted the links into the titles. Now, I have to go back and remove the title link on my newsy site. The chances of getting my news site included in Google News is very, very, very, very slim. But why make it more difficult?

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Google Supports Open Directory Option

Ken Cheung — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 20:05:55 +0000

It looks like Google has finally decided to support MSN Search's meta tag for not using Open Directory description in the search results for your site. MSN introduced the tag last May. Basically, by using the special meta tag, you're directing search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information for the page's description.

Here are the meta tags again:

The first tag tells all search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information. The second one is limted to just MSN Search and the last one limits it to Google.

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Bigdaddy Spanks Reciprocal Links

Ken Cheung — Wed, 17 May 2006 20:27:53 +0000

It looks like Matt Cutts has created quite a stir with his Indexing timeline post. At the time of this writing, there were 156 comments.

In Matt's post, he outlines the timeline for Bigdaddy, Google's latest indexing/crawl algorithm. It appears a lot of people are upset because their pages were dropped from the index. After looking at the example sites given by webmasters, Matt concluded the primary reason was because Google's algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause this include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.

Read Bigdaddy Spanks Reciprocal Links (475 words)

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Google Ranking Program

Ken Cheung — Sat, 13 May 2006 03:42:29 +0000

I've finally had time to signup for a Google API key so I could try this nifty Google ranking program. A long time ago, I use to use Web Position to find my ranking for various keywords, but I stopped using it for fear of being punished by Google. Now I can legally use a page ranking tool for free. Give it a try. Its a big time saver. You can signup for a free Google API key here.

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