SEO, Adsense and General Stuff

Google Adwords £30 Voucher in this month’s .net magazine

Greg — Thu, 03 May 2007 17:59:32 +0000

Just a heads up for anyone in the UK that .net magazine has a £30 voucher for Google Adwords this month (Special Google issue). The voucher is unique and expires on the 31/08/07 for new accounts less than 14days old.

.net sells in the USA under the name Web Builder I think and it may or may not have a voucher in that edition.

Sorting out vBulletin Spam

Greg — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 18:46:31 +0000

Over the last few months, I’ve been battling spam on a forum I own. Tried everything from captcha, require new users to validate their emails and I still got loads of spam.

I headed over to vBulletin.org to find a good plugin and found this. It uses your Akismet API key to filter certain usergroups posts. Akismet has worked really well on this (Akismet has caught 23,837 spam for me since I first installed it.) and a few other blogs that I own so i thought i’d check it out.

Hopefully this will be the end of spam

Create a Digg This Button

Greg — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:22:55 +0000

On many sites there will be a “Digg This” button which will send you to digg where you fill out a title and description. Technewsworld is one of them, but instead of having to fill out all the details it is already done for you. Here is the code;

Digg It

The script is self explanitary, just edit the way you want. By using this script, it may make users more likely to submit your site if they know they don’t have to fill out a description and title etc.

The user who noticed this on digg said;

pressing the “Digg It” link in the site made everything ridiculously easy… the title, description, and even the topic was already filled in. Somebody really wants the traffic generated from Digg.

Why you were banned from adsense

Greg — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:23:56 +0000

Saw a good post today on digg which lists 5 reasons you were probably banned from adsense.

All of them involve clicking your own ads which is no suprise.

Some of the comments list extra reasons such as modifing the code and using a similar ad network on the same page.

Web Publisher Isn’t Liable for Defamation

Greg — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 14:56:49 +0000

A californian court has ruled that web publishers and internet providers aren’t responsible for defamatory comments written by others. The court ruled that people claiming they were defamed online could now only seek damages from the original author of the comments - and not the website which re-posted it. Good news for bloggers and forum owners…
Full Story at BBC News

Sign up to Yahoo Search Marketing and get a $50 credit

Greg — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:23:57 +0000

Just saw on Shoemoney that if you sign up to Yahoo Search Marketing , you get a $50 credit. You may want to get your hands on that deal incase they pull it.

Google have also done them in the past but they are quite rare to find now, the last one I saw was in .Net magazine last year. Speaking of Google, I assume you have heard about Google buying YouTube for $1.65bn in shares. YouTube is a very popular site and I’m sure they will find someway to make some money from it. They’ve already said that they want to allow directors to make money from uploading videos. We’ll see where this goes…

Google Gadgets For Your Site

Greg — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:45:08 +0000

All the gadgets you can get on Google IG are now avaliable on your site. Go to this url: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open and check them out. Some are pretty crappy but there are some good ones that could be used well on some sites.

Registrar Coupons

Greg — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:03:38 +0000

The coupon BESTVALUE for namecheap.com expired recently so I was trying to find another one as they still have the free whois guard protection. I found a new code;

MORE4LESS

Also a pretty cool site which lists the major registrars and any coupons they have listed. The URL is; http://www.dncoupons.com/

What’s been going on in the last 2 weeks then?

Greg — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 22:41:50 +0000

After the most uncomfortable flight ever from Mexico, I have finally arrived back in the UK. I’m jetlagged at the moment and can’t be bothered writing much so here is some stuff I’ve found interesting on my return.

Adsense testing non branded ads. I’ve found that the more the ads blend in the higher the CTR. Good news then.
YPN is making it easier to report bad publishers
Search Engine Strategies in San Jose starts tommorrow.

As usual Jensense has some stuff about the adsense and YPN and other sites I link to will no doubt cover the SES conference. I’ve probably missed some stuff as I have only read a few news feeds.

What not to do with YPN

Greg — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:16:09 +0000

It looks like YPN are trying to crack down on Made-For-Adsense (Or Yahoo) sites. On all of the sites I have seen running YPN, the ads are all intrusive

Don’t duplicate (*cough* STEAL *cough*) content from other sites. We want to be with someone original.

Agreed. You should write your own content or pay someone to do it for you.

Don’t place images next to ads. It’s dishonest and we want to be in a long term relationship with publishers everyone can trust. People will think those images have to do with the ads, and when they find that the site they’ve been directed to has nothing to do with them, they’ll be pretty miffed.

Bit of a suprise, they are the first ad company to tell its users not to put images near their ads. Google Adsense did tell its users to make sure a clear divider was between images and the ads. Most of the ads I have seen on YPN with images have been related but I can see their point.

Don’t go nuts with the ads and place them all over every page like they’re your content or something. It looks like you are trying too hard.

Finally cracking down on this, I hate sites that blend in the ads to make it look like their part of the content. A site that does this particularly well is tutorialized.com (check out their tutorials to see what I mean). Not only does it look like
you’re trying too hard but it tricks users.

Don’t send us traffic from Zimbabwe or Ireland. Not that there’s anything wrong with Zimbawe or Ireland, but right now we’re just not ready to make that big, international commitment. We’re working on it, though, so be patient, and good things will come.

Good luck trying to stop that. Geo-targetting databases can cost alot and the free ones can be hard to come across.

You can read the rest of them over at the YPN Blog.