Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis - JenSense.com

Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis - JenSense.com Pearls from: "Interview with the AdSense million dollar man, Jason Calacanis...$1M a year in Google Adsense (or why 2,739 is my favorite number) - The Jason Calacanis Weblog - calacanis.weblogsinc.com _

What single change do you think made the biggest leap in your AdSense income?

1. Taking off the borders around the advertisement
2. Making the links the same color as the links on the blog

What is the best piece of advice you have for a publisher brand new to AdSense? What would you have done differently when you started with AdSense, knowing what you do now.

I would have run four ads per page, taken off the borders, and made the links the same color as the links on the blog. I would have also made channels for each position and blog so I could track things better.

How many times do you login to AdSense a day? Are you a stats junkie who checks every ten minutes? Or do you check only once or twice a day?

I have about 50 saved Adsense reports in a folder on my Opera browser. Every day I click on it and autoload the 50 pages. I then scan and look for trends. Sometimes I find a CTR spike or an eCPM of note. However, it's pretty steady at this point




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Adsense changes update from Google

: "There have been many improvements to AdSense over the past few months � some of them immediately obvious and others that may have slipped by you unnoticed. We like to keep you up to date with all these changes, so we have outlined the major changes below. In most cases, we have provided links to more information about the subject, but there is still a lot to read in this email! So settle in and read on for the full story."

Google Anticipated Microsoft Exec Fight - Forbes.com

Summary so far.....Google Anticipated Microsoft Exec Fight - Forbes.com: "Newly released court documents reveal that Google Inc. anticipated a fight with Microsoft Corp. when it hired a top executive away from the software behemoth to launch a new research and development center in China. "

Urchin and GoogleAnalytics.com.

Cre8asite forums. Google - Urchin and GoogleAnalytics.com. [ Search Engine Optimization, Usability and Web Design. ] bragadocchio posts about a thread at Threadwatch called GoogleAnalytics.com - Urchin on it's Way?, about a new domain name that Google registered, in light of Google's purchase of Urchin.

He also links to a patent application release with Urchin's name on it at: United States Patent Application: 0050165889: "United States Patent Application" System and method for monitoring and analyzing internet traffic - this " at how data from specific users is kept together using a "Visitor Centric Data Modeling" approach. It also provides some interesting techniques for trying to identify who thoses visitors are."

Slashdot | Google Patents RSS Advertising

Slashdot | Google Patents RSS Advertising: "IO ERROR writes "Google [1]filed a patent application for targeted advertising in RSS feeds about a year and a half ago. The USPTO has now assigned it a number and [2]placed it online. The patent application covers both targeting in RSS feeds and geotargeting by IP address. It gives some insight into how Google's ad servers work."

United States Patent Application: 0050165615: "Embedding advertisements in syndicated content Incorporating targeted ads into information in a syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner is described. Syndicated material e.g., corresponding to a news feed, search results or web logs, are combined with the output of an automated ad server. An automated ad server is used to provide keyword or content based targeted ads. The ads are incorporated directly into a syndicated feed, e.g., with individual ads becoming items within a particular channel of the feed. The resulting syndicated feed including targeted ads is supplied to the end user, e.g., as a set of search results or as a requested web log. Embedding of targeted ads into syndicated feeds and/or user response to the embedded ads is be tracked in an automated manner for billing. The automated targeting and insertion process allows ads to be kept current and timely while the original feed may be considerably older. "

Google hit with job discrimination lawsuit

Shenanigans....Google hit with job discrimination lawsuit | CNET News.com: "A former Google sales executive has filed a lawsuit against the search giant, alleging it engaged in job discrimination while she was pregnant with quadruplets. "

Google - Record Number of Searches in Q2

E-Commerce News: "While Google's market share for search increased from the first quarter, when it was 35.9 percent -- as did Ask Jeeves' share, which climbed from 5.3 percent, and AOL's, which jumped from 9.1 percent -- Yahoo's share fell from 31.2 percent and MSN's from 16.3 percent.

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About Google Scholar

About Google Scholar: "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Google buys Brazil firm for research center

Google buys Brazil firm for research center: "Web search leader Google said Wednesday that it bought Brazil's Akwan Information Technologies, which it will use to set up a research and development center for Latin America. The small Brazilian company develops information search systems for companies"

Optimizing for Google AdWords' New Quality Score System

Optimizing for Google AdWords' New Quality Score System: "by Greg Ives - KeywordRanking
In the coming weeks, Google will release a new method for deciding when your ads show up. Out with the old system of 'on hold, in trial and disabled' keywords and in with 'the quality based system,' where keywords are either active or inactive...

There are several issues that will be challenging for marketers.

Inexperienced advertisers will likely increase their max CPC to retain their paid search rankings. This only provides a short term solution that will drain your budget and leave your ad costing too much.

Increasing CPC is one thing you can do in order to attain active status, but the correct thing to do prior to spending more money per click is to improve your quality score through optimization.

In addition, inexperienced advertisers are likely to erase existing keywords that aren't activated but could easily become so by changing the structure of the account, budgeting, etc (see below). This could lose them some easy return on keywords that convert.

To keep your keywords activated an experienced agency will:

* alter the structure of the account, campaigns, ad groups and keywords
* alter campaign budgeting
* refine content targeting
* optimize for your max CPC
* select proper keyword matching
* ensure rotation of quality ad text
* proper keyword selection
* build out campaign negative keywords
* implement content website exclusion"

Google PageRank

SiteProNews: "Google PageRank
Update Analysis By Dave Davies

The most current PageRank update will undoubtedly cause a largër stir than usual in that many sites have shown drops in their visible PageRank while at the same time showing significant increases in their backlinks. This fact reveals that one of three things has occurred in this latest update:

1) Google has raised the bar on PageRank, making it more difficult to attain a high level, or
2) The way they are displaying their backlinks has changed, or
3) The way they calculate the value of an incoming link has changed.

Concludes: "if you've noticed that everyone around you has stayed the same or increased in PageRank try to remember this, there's nothing you can do about where you're currently positioned in regards to PageRank and it will probably be another 3 months before Google updates the public PageRank again so ... start building some good quality (high relevancy, solid PageRank) links. Work towards an increase in the next update.

Panicking now won't help, intelligent reaction will."

Google Sitemaps One Month Later

forums.searchenginewatch.com: " Google Sitemaps One Month Later "

Google Doesn't Know it All

Steve Rubel points readers of his blog Micro Persuasion to: Google Doesn't Know it All: " Can't Find It On Google where people can talk about what they can't locate using the search engine."

Google wins copycat Web domain dispute

Google wins copycat Web domain dispute - BizReport: "The National Arbitration Forum said on Friday that Google Inc. has rights to the Internet domain names googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com, which are similar to its own google.com domain...

The NAF hears thousands of domain disputes each year under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in a dispute process that is an alternative to trademark lawsuits."

London blasts rock the Net; sites, blogs respond

Internet Daily: "News Web sites in the United Kingdom were hammered for almost four hours after the London bomb blasts occurred.

Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote Systems Inc., said the average measured U.K. site took four times longer than normal to respond.
Hardest hit were the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk), Sky News (www.sky.com/skynews/home) and the Financial Times (www.ft.com).

'The average response time for a home page on the Internet is two to three seconds,' Patel said in an interview. 'So that means some sites took up to 10 seconds. That's doesn't seem significant until you realize the hardest-hit sites were experiencing such traffic they dragged down the average of the 37 other sites [in the Keynote (KEYN: news, chart, profile) U.K. "

Google, partners to back broadband venture -WSJ

Internet News Article | Reuters.com: " Google Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Hearst Corp. are investing about $100 million in Current Communications Group, a start-up that offers high-speed Internet connections over electricity lines, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. "

Keeping an Eye on Google

Keeping an Eye on Google: "A new report offers fascinating, in-depth insights on how users interact with Google search results, based on studies using eye-tracking technology.
The report, from Enquiro, Did-It and Eyetools, is a comprehensive white paper that builds on an earlier press release that described Google's 'golden triangle' of search results.
The study found that most viewers looked at results in an 'F' shaped scan pattern, with the eye travelling vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right, as if something caught the participant's attention.
The new study expands significantly on the initial findings, offering a detailed look at the methodology used and much more granular conclusions examining all aspects of Google search results. For example, the study showed that searchers react to organic results differently than they react to sponsored listings. "

July stock of the month: Google

July stock of the month: Google - Internet Services - Internet - Analyst: "Google's surge past $300 a share in June helped push the dollar volume trading of the stock to $112 billion according to data compiled by the Hulbert Financial Digest, making it the July stock of the month for Trading Strategies."

Google mobile search: Google Blog

Google Blog: The world in your pocket"Steven Schirripa, Software Engineer

Since millions of people across the globe already use mobile phones like there's no tomorrow, we're launching Mobile Web Search in many languages. Try it the next time you visit Google on your mobile phone - you'll see a new option to search the Mobile Web. How different is it than standard web search? There are sites out there that have already been designed for your mobile phone, which makes them more navigable on the small screen. So we've created an index specifically for these sites. And so your phone can now be that much more useful."

http://mobile.google.com/mobile_search.html
Currently results in error message

www.internetnews.com Reports : "Aiming to make search easier for users on the go, Google (Quote, Chart) released Google Mobile Web Search on Thursday.

The new service points users of Internet-enabled mobile devices to a special index of Web pages that have been optimized by their publishers for the small screen. The XHTML-based service takes advantage of the alignments of text, graphics and tables that mobile-aware publishers have created to make them easier to navigate on a mobile phone.

Nishar didn't discount the possibility of including ads in Mobile Web Search results. "We haven't started doing that," he said, "and Google does not make forward-looking statements." But he said that mobile ads could be delivered as an extension of the company's existing technology."

Problems With Google Sitemaps

DMNews.com: "By: Stephan Spencer Netconcepts"

Outlines what he sees as two major problems, one of which he has a solution for sale....

"First, it doesn’t solve the duplicate pages problem that a great many dynamic sites have. Even the Google Store suffers from this....

Duplicate pages, on its own, may not sound like a problem for Webmasters as much as it is for Google itself, which has to dedicate additional resources to maintain all this redundant content in its index. However, it does have serious implications for Webmasters, because it results in PageRank dilution -- where multiple versions of a page split up the “votes” (links) and PageRank score that a single version of the page would aggregate.

This brings me to the second, related problem with Google Sitemaps: It doesn’t do anything to alleviate the phenomenon of PageRank dilution. PageRank dilution results in lower PageRank, which in turn results in lower rankings. For example, consider that the above-mentioned Google Store’s product page (the “Black is Back T-Shirt”) is in Google’s index five times instead of just once. So each of those five variations earns only a fraction of the total potential PageRank score that it could have earned if all the links pointed to a single “Black is Back T-Shirt” page"....

He suggests both of the above issues could be rectified: by extending robots.txt with some additional directives "that specify:

· Which parameter in a dynamic URL is the “key field.”

· Which parameter is the product ID and which is the category ID (specifically for online catalogs).

· Which parameters are superfluous or that don’t significantly vary the content displayed.

Armed with this information, Googlebot will be able to not only eliminate duplicate pages but also intelligently choose the most appropriate version to save in its index and then associate with that page the PageRank of ALL versions of the page. The days of session IDs killing a site’s Google visibility would be over! Google admits in its Sitemaps FAQ that session IDs are still a problem even with the advent of Google Sitemaps:

Question: URLs on my site have session IDs in them. Do I need to remove them? Yes. Including session IDs in URLs may result in incomplete and redundant crawling of your site. "