Category Archives: Google

Online Safety Tips Publishers Should Keep in Mind

Update and modify. By now, this should be the standard operating procedure (SOP) of every publisher as well as business owners who operate on the web and even private individuals who have various accounts on the internet.

Similar to the real world, one’s safety online should be of a top priority. It pays to be vigilant and not end up a victim of scams, frauds and identity theft.

Online-security-Hacking-Tips

Statistics show that internet scam complaints from 2005 to 2009 went up from 100,000 per year to almost 300,000. The top scams include identity theft, FBI-related scams, miscellaneous fraud, advance fee fraud and spam. Most of these scams come from the U.S. (65.9%), the U.K. (10.4%) and China (3.1%).
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Originally posted on February 8, 2013 @ 9:37 pm

Google Adsense: Moderation is the Key

Monetization using Google’s Adsense is far trickier than you might have imagined. You might think that since Adsense is a Google product, then they would certainly be biased towards pages that carry such ads. However, in reality correlation studies have shown that the more space Adsense ads occupy on a page, the lower that page will tend to rank. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Google is picking on their own ad service, but that it is merely consistent with how search engines (and users) view paid links.

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.

Originally posted on October 17, 2011 @ 9:48 am

Google’s Acquisition of AdMob, Good for Mobile Publishers

The big news today is Google’s acqusition of AdMob, a mobile advertising technology company, for a whooping $750 million. For a huge company such as Google that amount of money is nothing compared to the projected impact of AdMob’s integration to Google’s online advertising products.  But for ordinary netizens like us, what does this deal brings? Continue reading

Originally posted on November 9, 2009 @ 8:16 pm

Google PageRank Update and Microsoft BrowseRank

Google has been fighting hard to make their PageRank system relevant once again in helping people quickly understand if they are on a worthwhile site or not, and there has been some notice, including a post by Matt Cutts, that Google will be updating their PageRank once again over the next few days. Some people have already reported new ranks, but none of my sites have seen any love from Google as of yet.

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.

Originally posted on July 26, 2008 @ 12:30 am

Google PageRank Update: Again!?

First we had a Google that almost didn’t seem like it wanted to update PageRanks, and now they are updating fairly regularly. I haven’t noticed any shifts in any of my blogs as of yet, but I think faster updates by Google will keep PageRank relevant.

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.

Originally posted on April 30, 2008 @ 10:51 am