Ad Blocking is Immoral
After a terrible write up claiming that Ad Blocking is Moral made the front page of Reddit, I felt obliged to respond. First, a brief response. For lack of a better word, (actually, this is pretty much the perfect word), the piece is drivel. It cases the ethics of Ad Blocking (visitor) and Ad Serving (publisher) in terms of effectiveness, relevancy, and business modeling. While these may all be useful arguments of whether a publisher ought to use advertising to generate revenue, it does not create a meaningful ethical statement on whether subverting advertising efforts is moral. Examples: Sarcastic Response: “In other words, people should support bad business models because it’s more convenient for the businessmen.” Not supporting a bad business...
Google’s New Algorithm: if($domain==’wikipedia.org’){$rank=1;}
I decided to take my last look at Wikipedia a little further to see just how much Google had sold out to everyones-favorite-online-encyclopedia. Does Wikipedia really deserve the rankings that it receives? Or, as many suggest, are single Wikipedia entries receiving the benefit of the doubt by Google’s algorithm because of the strength of the domain? While merely anecdotal evidence (I have yet to run a complete check as I did before), I wanted to take a look at an example where Wikipedia recently took the #1 position. I chose the keyword Entrepreneurship This simple test looked at the number of inbound links pointing directly to the page currently ranking in Google. Instead of looking at site-wide links, we look at the page that ranks itself while excluding...
Google Misses Earnings: Is Anyone Surprised?
It blows my mind that forecasters, including Google’s internal forecasts, did not more clearly take into account the impact that their June attack on arbitrage would have on their earnings. Google, bowing to pressures of general advertisers and searchers, decided to bite the hand that feeds it – the masses of Adsense publishers and Adwords arbitrage experts who poured money into Google. While their campaigns were targeted and only directly affected a handful of publishers and advertisers, the ripple effect (damn those ripple effects) spread throughout the industry sounding the bell tone: “if Google will go after Arbitrage, eventually, they will go after Made-For-Adsense”. I would love to see the defection rate of this past quarter compared...
Google AdPreview Feature Update
Google has now made the ad preview feature MUCH easier to use. Instead of having to manipulate the URL of the page utilizing a ‘cheat sheet’ (which Google has now taken down but you can see below for a general idea…) you can now select from a drop down menu of choices to check the location of you ad/natural listing from almost anywhere in the world. For those of you not familiar with this tool what it does is allow you to check your ad position without incurring impressions. This is great when trying to preserve ad quality as your CTR does not suffer due to anxious repetitive position checks. (I recommend telling your clients to use this feature to check their ads!!) This preservation will help in keeping cost down and positions up. The Old Way...
Bad Stats are Holding Back Web 2.0
I use “stats” generically here because, at its simplest meaning, what is holding back web 2.0 is bad statistical planning. You have to ask the right questions with the right controls to get the right answers so you can make the right recommendations. The napkin business plan generation apparently has not learned its lesson in the web 2.0 sphere, with new sites and communities launching by the dozens. Unfortunately, web 2.0 communities commonly make the following assumption: massive data, regardless of its quality, is sufficient. What we need is a more complete measurements (questions) and common, controlled subjects (wines). To illustrate this point, I would like to identify 3 wine Web 2.0 communities (Corkd – BottleNotes – TasteVine), 2...
Simplest Trick to Optimize Body Content
So, the general rules of thumb for body content are this… Keywords in important tags (h1, h2, h3, b or strong, em, maybe alt tags) Unique content as close to the top of the page as possible. The first issue is quite easy to handle, and has been spammed to death across the internet since the inception of search engines. However, moving unique content to the top of the code while maintaining an attractive, Google-guidelines-compliant page has proven more difficult. Let’s take a look. Headers, advertisements, navigation and more normally precede the really unique content on the page. But how much code and duplicate content does that create? In the case of FindArticles.com, we are looking at nearly 370 lines of code between the body tag and the unique...
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