The logic behind this is very simple. People tend to shy away from pages that have too much paid ads, as too much paid ads displayed suggest a spammy site.

Since users and Google alike do not like too much paid links on a site, what you should be conscious of as a publisher is to walk the fine line between monetizing your site and having it be considered as nothing more than a haven of paid links with nothing more substantial to offer. You can do this by being strategic in the placement of ads so as to minimize the use of ads as much as possible, yet ensuring that they get maximum exposure. You should also at least put some effort into making sure that the ads harmonize with the page’s look, so that even as they stand out enough to draw the eye (and clicks), they won’t end up and eyesore.

In the end, whether you have Adsense on your site, or use another ad service, following the above advice will help you in the long run.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

“this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue”

More engaging mobile ad formats, more relevant ads, greater ad reach and others are just some of the things that the whole mobile web publishing will most likely gain from Google’s acquisition of AdMob.

Google has successfully laid out a business model for online advertising, and it has started its goal to dominate  the mobile web advertising  as well.  Its acquisition of AdMob is the start of something big, so make sure you are prepared for it with your contents for the mobile web.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

What interests me the most is that Microsoft might get in the “ranking” business with BrowseRank, their own version of PageRank which they hope can’t be gamed in any way.

From Cnet:

The Microsoft researchers argue that PageRank has a number of problems. For one thing, people can game the system by building bogus Web sites called link farms. Those sites feature hyperlinks point to a Web page whose importance a person wants to inflate so it appears higher in search results. Another PageRank issue is that the indexing process doesn’t take into account the time a user spends on a particular site.

But user behavior, monitored in anonymous form by Web servers and Web browser plug-ins, can be better, the authors argue.

“Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank…in important page finding, spam page fighting, and relevance ranking.

The researchers gathered their data from “an extremely large group of users under legal agreements with them,” according to the paper.

It almost sounds like Microsoft wants to tap into people’s search patterns much like Alexa uses their toolbar to record traffic on sites, Microsoft wants to monitor which sites are being browsed, and where visitors are coming from and leaving to.

It is a lofty goal, for sure, but as we have seen in the online space, Microsoft rarely makes the right moves.

Will PageRank matter if Microsoft gets into having their own version of the system? Or better yet, is PageRank still relevant today? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

If you want to see what your PageRank is, I suggest checking out BlogFlux, as they have a fast tool for doing so, and most tools that show by data center don’t seem to be working.

I found out about it from 45n5.com.

I told him that I would take a look at it, and while my speciality isn’t really search engines, I did notice a few things right off the bat.

Code

Positioning
One of the first things I noticed about the xhtml generated by the theme used at Celebrity Cowboy is that the blogroll is near the top of the page, with more than twenty items linking out to other sites. While this is only on the front page of the site now, it wasn’t always like this and could have lead to a black mark for the site.

Then there is the content, and then the list of internal links to each one of the more than two dozen categories. Could Google be penalizing the site for having so many outbound links at the top of the page of code, and so many links near the bottom? Could they see this as an attempt to effect search engine rankings by stuffing links in a site?

Things like this have happened before and Google has always been harsh on such things. The flip side though is that all of these links are relevant. Google doesn’t penalize for relevant links, do they?

With Google’s war against paid links, I would be surprised if a few sites got caught in the crossfire, and with these links being site-wide, Google may have mistaken them as paid links.

No doubt they would like sites to make sure to no-follow their blogrolls and other external links that aren’t part of the normal daily content, despite being relative.

Validation
The theme that Celebrity Cowboy is using doesn’t validate. Google has proved time and time again that if you don’t work hard on making your code valid, you can cause yourself to drop in the rankings, and even sometimes to be marked as a “bad” site.

Sometimes sites get listed on stopbadware.org just because their JavaScript doesn’t work correctly, or advertising doesn’t load properly. I have seen this happen to more than a few sites.

Fixing up as many validation issues as possible, could help remove the penalty placed on the site, as Google’s indexing bots might then be able to index the content more efficiently, and without error.

One of the things I first noticed was that there is an ID used more than once, something that probably doesn’t effect the Google search bots, but something that is not correct in xhtml. Classes should be used for repeating items, not ID’s.

Correcting such things should also improve how various browsers render the site, which could have the side effect of increasing traffic, page views, and even links to the blog.

Just Plain Strange
There was one more thing about the coding of the site that really got me scratching my head. It seems that the header image is displayed via CSS, and so rather than showing an image with the proper hyperlink code around it, the coder chose to use JavaScript to make the div that the header is shown thanks to, into a clickable item that uses location.href to bring the visitor back to the index page.

To me this seems like a very bad way to do this effect, and probably not one that Google looks highly on.

Content

One issue that Google has with many sites, especially celebrity sites is “thin content”. They constantly adjust rankings based on this issue. So many articles on Celebrity Cowboy have less than one hundred words, and this can make Google cranky.

An example of a post that has really thin content is the George Clooney Reacts to Nicole Kidman’s Pregnancy post. There are less than two dozen words here, and an image. Surely the writer could give a few more points about both George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, and older actresses being pregnant.

I suggest increasing the number of articles that include over a one hundred words, reducing blockquotes from other sites, lists of external links, and other content which doesn’t increase the usefulness of Celebrity Cowboy.

There should be at least one hundred words of fresh, original content in as many articles as possible.

This is made worse when you remove information around a single post. Remove images, external links, advertisements, repeated content like the popular articles list, and about text, and you are left with very little actual content for Google to sift through, with a very high amount of code.

Another way of reducing this thin content issue, on the front page, and each subsequent page and archive area is to increase the amount of stories shown per page, and while this might not be as important on the front page, it is definitely an issue on other pages, and archive areas where only summaries are shown.

There is a plug-in for WordPress that allows you to change how many posts are shown depending on where the user is on the site. I would suggest enacting this plug-in, and increasing each page to between fifteen and twenty-five posts. While this will make pages longer, it will mean more content per page for Google to see, and the increase in code and loading times should be negligible.

Comments
Another suggestion on how to help your blog would be to find a way to increase user participation in the form of comments. You could highlight the person who has commented the most, or feature the best comment of the week. The cost would be an outbound link, but the reward could be more comments, which can help keep a post fresh in the eyes of search engines, and contribute to the content indexed on the page.

I have actually ranked fairly high for a keyword that I didn’t write, but instead it was because a person commented and Google saw it.

Links

Just like the “thin content” penalty that Celebrity Cowboy may be getting, another issue might be the sheer number of links on each and every page. Also, in talking to the owner of the site, it seems that at one point they were both selling text link advertisements and promoting unrelated websites, neither of which Google looks very kindly on.

Content Scrapers

We all know what it means to deal with spam blogs, but it looks like Celebrity Cowboy has been targeted hard. A search on the popular search engines for specific titles show some very interesting results. It seems that Google has basically given in to content scrapers in this case, and Celebrity Cowboy is nowhere to be seen.

Something that might help identify content scrapers is to make sure you use plugins for WordPress that allow you to put a copyright notice before the content only in RSS. Also, Feedburner should list people using your content for bad things. Then it is just a matter of “nicely” asking them to stop or using htaccess to block their server’s IP address from even seeing the feed.

A good example of what is happening in regards to the content scrapers is when you take an article, with a unique title and search for it on Google.

You will see a the post that was made on Celebrity Cowboy about Constantine Maroulis showing up on a content scraper site, before Celebrity Cowboy, where it was originally written. This unfortunately seems to be happening on nearly every post.

Images

One of the things I noticed on a quick view of the code being generated is that on each image and embedded item in the content, there is extra style being added to remove padding, margins and borders. This is only beefing up the amount of code that Google sees, and contributing to the “thin content” problem I mentioned earlier.

This is most likely being added thanks to the WYSIWYG editor built into WordPress.

Advertising

Recently, there was a big issue with sites selling text link advertisements, and Google took steps to persuade people to stop selling such links, and while Celebrity Cowboy no longer has paid text links on the site, Google may not have fully restored the site in their search engine rankings.

I haven’t heard of anyone else really having such issues, in fact, most people that saw their PageRank drop due to a penalty for selling links, didn’t notice any shift in their search engine results.

Context

When a site changes both in design and server, which Celebrity Cowboy has, I am sure that Google “raises and eyebrow”. Google, or at least the program that indexes our blogs probably asks itself, “has the site been sold, or changed so much that we should re-index it? Is it really the same site we have come to know and love, or should we put it in the sandbox for a while?”

Surely, with all the changes that Google has seen happen to the site, it isn’t going to carry on without giving it an extra dose of scrutiny. Unfortunately, if there was some extra weight behind the site in the past, it may have lost this through changing IP addresses. I haven’t heard of this happening before, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t a possibility.

Google has done some strange things in the past, and Celebrity Cowboy isn’t the only example of something like this happening. You could be doing everything right for a long period of time, yet something changes with Google, and you are pushed so far down the rankings, that you almost have to start again with a new site.

Steps Already Taken

Over on Celebrity Cowboy, they have been trying very hard to take every step they can think of to rectify their search engine problem, and here are just a few that were mentioned to me:

1. Changed the blogroll to only show up on the front page
2. Show categories in the right column after the content
3. Only show categories with at least 5 posts
4. Removed all text link ads
5. Removed all unrelated, self-owned cross promotion
6. Cleaned up theme code to remove unnecessary tags
7. Worked on building more links within the celebrity niche

It seems like many steps have been taken, but the search engines, especially Google, haven’t changed their view towards Celebrity Cowboy. Could it be a waiting game now, as the last major change was changing servers in the middle of November 2007? I doubt it. I am positive that there needs to be more work done on the site in order for the search engine penalty to be removed.

Suggestion Rundown

• Get your code to validate
• Increase content per post
• Promote people that comment
• Decrease outbound links
• Fight content scrapers
• Deal with garbage code being added to posts
• Nofollow all links that are not in your content, or part of your own site

There is no reason why Google would prefer content scrapers over the original content providers, and I hope this is just an error on their part that they will eventually fix, but the reality is that their mistakes effect bloggers and business owners, and if they don’t get better at providing helpful, valuable, and correct search results, people will eventually move somewhere that does.

For Celebrity Cowboy, and other sites that have been similarly effected, I know this can be very frustrating, but the best thing you can do is complain loudly, and hope that the Internet backs you up in your fight to be properly considered in the major search engines.

Hopefully, this will change soon and that the tips I have listed will help enough to at least be ranked higher than the scrapers.

From Google’s Inside AdSense blog:

Following their success in the U.S., we’re rolling out video units over the next several days to English-language publishers in the UK, Ireland, and Canada. If you’re not already familiar with video units, they’re embedded, customizable video players that can enrich your site with relevant video content while enabling you to earn extra revenue from the relevant, non-intrusive ads that accompany the videos.

With this new launch, publishers in the UK, Ireland and Canada will be able to show videos from our YouTube content partners and choose those videos by category, individual YouTube partner, or have video automatically targeted to their site. Based on publisher feedback, we’ve also just added a feature which lets you choose individual videos to be displayed in your video units.

I am not sure how well these video units do, but I bet a bunch of people will be using them over the course of the next few months. Are you excited about this release, or if you live in the States, do we, in Canada, have a reason to be excited?

Are you already planning for the next PageRank update? Are there any other metrics that are now considered more accurate to the quality of a site? Let me know in the comments below.

A friend of mine recently noted that search engines are strange beasts, and it can be difficult to rank for keywords. He wanted to know why certain stories got ahead of others. Was it content? Was it links? What was controlling where things rank…especially in Google?

To answer some of these questions, I’ve decided to do an analysis on a currently popular search phrase: “Amy Fisher Sex Tape” without the quotes (a non-exact phrase search, since most users don’t use exact phrase search).

Lately, there has been increased buzz online about the possible release of an Amy Fisher Sex Tape, something brought to my attention by the same friend. I really didn’t know what to expect. This is something I wouldn’t normally search for. (no, really…seriously…please believe me)

Before we get into the analysis, who the hell is Amy Fisher anyway? Well this little blurb from Wikipedia sums her up nicely:

Amy Elizabeth Fisher (born August 21, 1974), dubbed the “Long Island Lolita” by the press, is an American woman convicted of the 1992 shooting of the wife of her lover, with whom she began an affair as a 16 year-old student at Kennedy High School in Bellmore, New York. Fisher served seven years in prison for aggravated assault, and was released in 1999. The case drew a great deal of media attention, and Fisher has become a writer since that time.

So now on to the analysis.

Keywords in URL

Out of the top seven sites listed by Google’s search of Amy Fisher Sex Tape, only four had all of the words in their URL. The Rad Report, The Hollywood Gossip, PopCrunch, and NS4W. These sites rank third, fifth, sixth and seventh respectively. The first and second sites listed by Google don’t include all of the keywords.

Keywords in the Title

Interestingly, two of the top 10 results in Google’s SERPS do not contain an exact phrase match on “Amy Fisher Sex Tape” – in fact, the number one result is missing the phrase, as is the NY Post article. This seems to point to the fact that there are other, seemingly more important, factors involved in SERP rankings. This is not to diminish the importance of Title keywords…but it is to point to the fact that strong SERP positioning can be had without exact keyword matching in the title.

Content

So my first thought was that whichever site had the most content and subtly stuffed it full of Amy Fisher Sex Tape keywords would be the top result in all the search engines.

The first site, Crime library, brought up by Google’s US search included the word “Amy”, seventeen times, but “sex” was only used four times, and “tape” five times. The second site, Tim Worstall Tabloid Edition, had “fisher” fourteen times, “sex” ten times, and “tape” nine times.

This already disproves, for me, that keyword density in the content is the sole reason for the ranking of the sites. It might not even be all that high in how Google ranks a site, though it still should be a given to optimize in such a way.

I checked out the rest of the top seven sites for the search term, and found that some sites had next to no real article, just a series of pictures, while others had long articles, and very few relevant images.

Position / Site / Word Count
1.) Crime Library (693)
2.) Tim Worstall Tabloid Edition (251)
4.) New York Post (447)
6.) PopCrunch (37)

As you can see from the above table, word count might help you boost your rankings on the search engine, but at the same time they might not really hold you back.

In fact, many SEO experts believe that there is a thin content penalty, and shorter articles won’t usually rank well. If that is really the case, then how did PopCrunch get to the sixth spot with only 37 words? Could there be other factors at play to push sites up, or pull them down?

Google PageRank

Naturally, we all assume that the higher the Google PageRank a site has, the better it will rank, so it didn’t surprise me that Crime library with its PageRank 7 ranked first on the list. What was surprising though is that the New Your Post, while also having a PageRank of 7 sat in fourth place in the listings. Finding itself beaten by PR5 and PR6 sites. Also interesting to note is the PR3 Popcrunch beating out the PR4 NS4W.

Can we learn anything from this then? Well, it seems that site PageRank isn’t the main factor in deciding where things come up when searching for various terms, but it seems that having PageRank on a relevant article can push you to the top. The article about Amy Fisher on Crime library has a PageRank of 3, while all other sites listed don’t have any PageRank on the article page.

Could that be the golden star you need to get pushed to the top? If so, then how are all the PR 0 pages following it being sorted?

Age of the Page

While it might be tempting to say that the Crime Library article ranks higher because it has been assigned a PageRank, a more accurate analysis might simply be that the page is older. In fact, the number one result from Crime Library isn’t even really about the Amy Fisher sex tape. It’s a page that was created long before the rumors of a sex tape emerged.

Perhaps, in this case, Google’s weighting the SERPS heavily towards age plus authority? What does this tell us? Well, I think it shows that age can often be a negative indicator of relevancy for recent news searches.

Popularity of the Page

So maybe popularity has something to do with it? Is it the popularity of the site, or the backlinks to the article that helps Google judge what content is important, and what isn’t?

Crime library’s article has eleven back links from eleven sites. The Rad Report’s has 60 from four sites. The New York Post has 789 links from twenty-nine sites (the best link portfolio of the bunch), and PopCrunch has 291 links from seven sites. Not only does Crime library have close to the least number of links in the sites we are taking our data from, but the links that it does have appear to be mostly from spammy looking sites. So the number of links you have aimed at the post, as well as the number of sites those links are coming from don’t instantly result in higher rankings in Google.

So what about other systems for judging site popularity? Could Alexa or Technorati give us a clue on how things will rank?

Position / Site / Alexa / Technorati
1.) Crime library / 12,183 / No Technorati
2.) Tim Worstall / 114,918 / 10,029
3.) The Rad Report / 61,213 / 28,099
4.) New York Post / 2,268 / 16,059
6.) PopCrunch / 15,590 / 2,775

As you can see, as with almost all of the pieces of data so far, there are discrepancies on how things rank. Alexa is well known to not be the most precise system for finding out how popular a site is, but usually if you are comparing sites in the same niche, it is pretty good as a comparison tool. This time though we have a site with a rank of less than three thousand behind three other sites in Google. We have a site with a fairly low rank of nearly one hundred and fifteen thousand sitting second on Google.

Technorati wasn’t much better in figuring out where the sites should rank as the sixth site, PopCrunch outranks the rest, and is sitting sixth according to Google. Again, Technorati isn’t even close to perfect, but should things be so out of whack in other measuring services? Does this tell us anything useful about Google and how a sites popularity will relate to its position in the rankings?

Various Search Engines

So then I went to see what the other search engines had to say. Google might be the biggest, but they aren’t the only one online, and what I found was rather interesting. I did the same search for Amy Fisher sex tape on Ask.com, Yahoo.com and Live.com and only one of the original results from Google appeared in the first page of the other sites, and that’s the New York Post article. It appeared in the number one spot on Live.com, Microsoft’s search engine.

Oddly enough, PopCrunch also made an appearance, at the bottom of Ask’s first page, but not for one of the Amy Fisher articles on the site, but instead for their post entitled, Amy Winehouse Escapes Rehab For American Tour. Seems Google is not the only search engine a little confused when it comes to this story, though admittedly Google’s results are at least about Amy Fisher.

Surprises

There were three big surprises in this analysis. The first was that New York Post ranked fourth behind sites that in pretty much every way, shouldn’t be above the New York Post. The site has a great Google PageRank, it has a great Alexa rank, the article length was reasonable, and the back links included some great sites including Fox News, Gothamist, and the Drudge Retort. So what is holding it back from getting higher on the list?

Well, it doesn’t have all the keywords in its URL and it didn’t have one of the best keyword densities, but other than that, it looks great. Much stronger than the number one result.

The second big surprise was that Google placed an outdated and irrelevant page as the number one SERP result. Clearly this is a case of Google emphasizing age over other factors. Age works for some niches, but not for celebrity news. And the result that gets returned should be a little embarrassing for the people at Google.

The third big surprise has to do with the PopCrunch result. The site has no less than five articles relating to the Amy Fisher Sex Tape and each of the posts have all the keywords in their title.

The Posts: oldest to newest

• Amy Fisher Sex Tape
• Amy Fisher Sex Tape Stills
• Amy Fisher Sex Tape Preview
• Amy Fisher Sex Tape Lawsuit
• Amy Fisher Sex Tape – Search Chatter Increasing

Why did Google take their second oldest post on the subject, and make it a front page worthy post, when others had more text, are more recent, and should probably be considered more relevant? Understanding the reason for Google’s decision on this issue would go a long way towards pwning the SERPS for other high-volume searches.

Tips and Lessons Learned

While nothing absolutely conclusive comes from this analysis of the major contributing factors to ranking high on Google, there are some great lessons we can learn from all of this.

Age Matters – There’s simply no question about this. Looking at the number one result leaves no doubt about the importance of age.

PageRank of Article Pages are Important – If you have many pages that get a Google PageRank, they will be more likely to rank well than those that have no PageRank. If your pages don’t have a rank, then Google moves on to other contributing factors to decide your position. This doesn’t mean that if you have a high PageRank on your main site that you will rank well in a bunch of keywords as sites with lower index page rank may have more pages with a ranking and beat you in search engine results positions. The important thing is to make sure that the internal pages of your site get a nice distribution of PageRank.

More Content Doesn’t Equal Higher Rank – Just because your article has thousands of words, loaded with keyword density, it doesn’t mean that Google will rank it higher. You can have the longest article in the world, but without taking into account other search engine optimization techniques, you won’t get to the first page.

Google is Still Smarter – While the first article was old, and not what I was looking for, most of the other results on the first page were right on target. Over on Ask, Yahoo, and Live, I found myself with almost as many results that weren’t about the Amy Fisher Sex Tape as I did results that were relevant.

I will admit though, seeing the New York Post article rank first on Microsoft’s Live Search does give me some hope for it, as I think that is where the article belongs.

Hosted Sites Still Rank High – I don’t know how I feel about sites hosted on TypePad and WordPress.com, but I almost feel that if they aren’t spending the money to get their own domain, and/or host their own content, that they shouldn’t rank as high as those of us that do spend the time and money. A Typepad blog was ranked second, and a Blogspot blog was on the first page, and I wonder if this positively effects their search engine position at all. In my view, there should actually be a dampening effect on hosted sites to encourage the elegance and aesthetic qualities of a stand alone domain.

More Traffic Doesn’t Mean Higher Rank – Getting tens of thousands of page views and not ranking very well for search terms? It doesn’t look like the two are necessarily correlated. Just because you are getting more traffic, doesn’t mean that Google gives every individual article preferential treatment.

More Information is Needed – If you have more thoughts about why certain sites rank higher than others, not covered in this article, please feel free to comment below with any information you think would be relevant. Search engines are an ever evolving beast with little verified information out there for the common blogger on getting things ranked well.

How do you rank for keywords?

Update: Of course Google’s SERPS change every day, and so when I checked out the search term today, I got different results. Also, you will have received different results depending on your location in the world. Go figure…

What really bothers me about all of this is not only that the reporting has gotten worse, but also that they don’t attempt to fix it, thus making my stats look really messed up, with huge dips in performance.

How does Google mess up so bad when it comes to reporting RSS subscriber numbers from its own service?

DailyBlogTips.com has a list of sites being effected in a post entitled, “Google Changing the PageRank Algorithm?“.

One thing that I find odd about this whole thing is Google’s selection of sites as it doesn’t seem to just be high level sites, but a bunch of smaller ones as well, if you read the comments on various blogs, you will see it extends beyond the dozen or two blogs that are well known and rightfully concerned about this shift.

Many bloggers have also come up with theories pertaining to the reduction in PageRanks, and they are all spreading some fear, uncertainty and doubt around the blogosphere. It would be nice to know the real reason for these penalties, but I doubt Google will share that information.

I think this is the push that bloggers, and advertising systems needed to remove Google’s PageRank from their valuation systems. Now is the time to come up with a more complex formula to decide a sites advertising worth. Take their unique visitors, add in their RSS subscribers, look at their growth, and factor in a dozen other pieces of information, and you will come up with a system that hopefully, can’t easily be gamed.

Keep watch on your blogs PageRank, and the traffic that Google is sending you. Hopefully, this is just Google stirring the pot, and will settle down soon.