WordPress hiding links to get money on AdSense

A hidden link is never hidden for long !

Goowiki

Interesting presentation on communication tools used by Google and other organization. We learn that Google is also using Wiki at the Plex.

Also look at that slide, the huge number of space they got internally :

You are currently using 364 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB.

Weird also to see the number of Spam messages ?

Yahoo! transgressing their own rules

Funny coincidence. I just receive a email from the Yahoo! team :

The URL you suggested

< url:http://www.the-site-I-submitted.com: >

was not added to Yahoo! Canada because the site
appears to be under construction. Here are some of
the most common factors that make a site incomplete:

- broken images or links
- text links that have no information yet
- an "under construction" announcement on the site
- a site that does not work in all major browsers

When your site is fully functioning, please resuggest
your listing through our online process.

Ok, the site I submit have two section "coming soon" on it. But all the products are there, only the testimonial and an other section missing.

But when you are searching for the new Yahoo! beta 360 °, surprise you'll see it with the directory listing :
"Category: Cyberculture > Virtual Communities"
But if you click on it you get a 404 page ! Even on the Jeremy page, all the horizontal menu give you 404 !

They should follow their own rules, no ?

Who are your neighbors who backlink you ?

A new tool have be released by WeBuildPages to show you who are backlink you and if thoses backlinks are in the same class C of IP addresses.
When a search engine see links coming from the same class C address (200.152.163.110 the first 3 octets of a IP address) to your site, it assume that class are owned by the same person or company and decreased the importance of thoses links.
A really great tool who will figure in my search engine marketing toolbox.

Yahoo! 360 : Nice Integration and GUI

Here a screen shot of the Yahoo! 360 to be launch next week on invitation :



More info in Forrester at Charlene Li's blog
.

Google Results : Sometime I don't understand

Which site you'll think you will see in first position when you enter "google definition" in Google ?
Look ahead.
Note Ask also place my blog in the top ten. Seem thoses are crazy ?

Here my speculation :

• "Google" and "Definition" are in the url without any word between
• "Google" and "Definition" are in the title of the post without any word between
• "Google" got three occurence in the short text of the post
• Google love blogger
  

But even with thoses it should not bring me there. Why ? Ah ha :

• "Google" is in the anchor text of 7 of my 10 previous post !

AFP shoot up his own customers

Suing Google is not always a good idea :

No matter how you look at it, AFP will lose this battle. It is inherently just an attempt to extort money out of Google. What AFP does not realize is how badly they have damaged their clients. Political Gateway is one of their clients and we have been devastated.

Microsoft put a online community for the global electronic artist

With all the hype on podcasting theses day, Microsoft haved jump in the train by providing Crossfader beta. Seem to be an online community with blogs, forums, electronic deposit a bit like Ourmedia.org.

Yahoo launch a Creative Commons Search Engine

Here a post on Yahoo Blog where Larry Lessig of CC explained the copyright protections for creative works.
The CC search engine is here.

Gigablast add reference and related pages to his SERPS

It seem Matt Wells made a really nice improvement to his Gigablast Site ! After a few queries I'm amazed with this new feature. Seem by far more effective than the other big players and specially in french queries. Wow!

But it's really late here and I got to test it more in a few hours. Be back.

Google cache reveal messages from the Minnesota killer

I think will see more and more robots.txt to disallow forum crawling after this.

Overture Ads Guideline : Cigarettes seem ok but no Cuban Cigar

Contrary to Google ads guideline Overture have not banned tobacco ads, but Cuban Cigar ads are prohibited. But on a few queries I made today on tobacco related products, I didn't find any ads.

Google News sued by the AFP

Why it's took around 3 years to proceed ? Bizarre !

Ask Jeeves has been sold for 1,85 billion in stock

Here is the communiqué. Seem to me a lot of money for a search engine I saw only once (0.08%) in my monthly log files.

Flickr going to Yahoo

The pro and free account will be enhanced.

Botnets Used to Cheat Ad Programs

Honeynet.org have release a paper on botnets where they list the uses of thoses small programs to cheat ad banners and PPC programs :

Installing Advertisement Addons and Browser Helper Objects (BHOs)

• Botnets can also be used to gain financial advantages. This works by setting up a fake website with some advertisements: The operator of this website negotiates a deal with some hosting companies that pay for clicks on ad. With the help of a botnet, these clicks can be "automated" so that instantly a few thousand bots click on the pop-ups. This process can be further enhanced if the bot hijacks the start-page of a compromised machine so that the "clicks" are executed each time the victim uses the browser.

Google AdSense abuse

• A similar abuse is also possible with Google's AdSense program: AdSense offers companies the possibility to display Google advertisements on their own website and earn money this way. The company earns money due to clicks on theses ad, for example per 10.000 clicks in one month. An attacker can abuse this program by leveraging his botnet to click on these advertisements in an automated fashion and thus artificially increments the click counter. This kind of usage for botnets is relatively uncommon, but not a bad idea from an attacker's perspective.

MSN AdCenter prototype to be launch in ....

Here a few paragraphs of the ClickZ post who seem more to me as a infomercial than a real article.

Following several days of media hype predicting MSN's imminent launch its own pay-per-click ad network, Microsoft today will reveal more modest plans. The company will demonstrate a prototype of a new paid search advertising platform at an event for ad clients in Redmond.

How to deflate a balloon !

At the sixth annual MSN Strategic Account Summit, Microsoft plans to show off to 500 of its top customers the new MSN adCenter, a platform that will eventually be used for ads throughout its network. The first component of adCenter is the paid search piece, which will be piloted within the next six months in Singapore and France to gather customer feedback. Eventually it will be launched worldwide.

NEVER before 2007 in America ? (Yahoo contract expire in june 2006 and normaly it's take 1 or 2 year to release 50% bugs free update to Microsoft)

"We're rolling out the pilots to demonstrate and learn what value software can add to the search platform," said Eric Hadley, senior director of advertising and marketing for MSN. "Right now, everybody thinks search is just about clicks, but it's about more than that. It's about connection with the customer."

Connection yes, but with the good content for users. MSN have always connected with advertisers but not with users outside its commercial entity.

The platform promises in-depth analytics and audience intelligence, including geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day. Advertisers will be able to access this information before placing their ad, so they will know what to expect before launching their campaign.

Geographic location and time of day OK, but I'd like to see how; audience intelligence, gender, age group and lifestyle can be achieve to mass market without registering user of a search engine. Are we talking of a PPC Platform or a MY MSN + Passport search engine ?

"This will really help drive ROI and the effective results of a search campaign beyond just knowing if somebody clicked on it, but to know if someone is likely to click on it. We think that's a huge step forward in this category," Hadley said.

Like the mouseover tracking at Google SERPS ?

While the full-scale deployment of the platform is not likely to happen before the end of the year, MSN is getting some early praise for providing advertisers with more control over their campaigns.

Welcome beta testers who will gave us money to help us correcting multiple bugs !

"Microsoft has laid out a roadmap for a product that looks to be a leap forward," said Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect. "By raising the bar, we're likely to see Google and Yahoo! raising the bar to keep up."

Should starting by giving us good results on organic search and may be users will come.

Google make a wink to Mac OS X users

Here is your new front door.

<inside>Consoles-toi CFD</inside>

Site Metrics Accuracy: Are you sure your data are good ?

You got two main methods to mesure trafic to your Web site; Log File Analyser like Webtrends or Clicktracks with or without javascript to add more information to your log file and cookies based system. For thoses who use the second methods, you should read that article about a research done by Jupiter Research who reveal :

• 12% of Internet users delete cookies on a monthly basis
• 17% do so weekly
• 10% every day
• 52% at least once in the last year

If your site metrics use cookies you should switch to that :

Google Local Business Center have forget Canadian

Google Local provide now a form to add or correct your listing in Google Local. You write your data in the form and Google will ship you a PIN number by snail-mail to the business's bricks-and-mortar address. The only drawback is there are no canadian province in the dropbox :-(

Mark Pilgrim Retaliate at the Google Toolbar

A new plug-in, under the GPL license, for Firefox to alterate Google Results Pages by adding links to it and removing ads. This is a response to the controversy new release of the Google toolbar who can add links to your page.
That's after a lot of patches to disabled the autolink feature.
Wake-up Google and drop that feature who was like Microsoft have done with the Smart Tags.

Searching Google : Position of the words in a query are important

In a Andy Beal post today I was surprise by his conclusion on how search engines would benefit from personalization. Shure it's true on the dream world, but it will take long before we saw that.

Even with a Desktop Search who gonna clusterize my hard drive to see what my point of interest and take it in account when I make a SE queries, it probably been wrong because I done a web site on berries a while ago and thoses words associates with berries in my hard drive would wrongly influence results on the fruits and not on the RIM Blackberry.

His query was using the wrong search engine. On Yahoo the position of the words on your query rarely get attention. This is bad and the terms you use have more than one meaning. On Yahoo the results on "cookies blackberry" and "blackberry cookies" are the same on the first page of two. On Google the first word of a query will have more weight and give a different set of results. For his query Google find the answer in second position, and if he was looking for food and not cookies files he should only inverse the term to find his "blackberry cookies" recipe in first position !
Not a soap and bathing page like Yahoo give on first place for those two queries ;-)

Gigablast to sell a 25% share of the business

Matt Wells and his company Gigablast are in a expansion dead-end. He want to sell a quarter of his business to hardware and personnel investments.
$8.5 million seem a good deal for all the possibilities in that market but with only a quarter of the cie, the investor have not a huge voice over the board.
Hope this will work for Matt and his very good search engine.

Something have changed at Google

I was reading a six weeks old post and try to see if the most used words (and stopwords for search engine to) in english langage have move. Surprise !

14th of january 2005
the = 8,000,000,000 / a = 8,000,000,000 / for = 8,000,000,000 /
to = 8,000,000,000 / of = 8,000,000,000 / and = 8,000,000,000 /
in = 7,560,000,000 / is = 3,820,000,000 / that = 2,690,000,000 /
it = 2,570,000,000 / he = 687,000,000 / was = 69,100,000

Today
the = 2,880,000,000 / a = 2,570,000,000 / for = 2,520,000,000 /
to = 2,680,000,000 / of = 2,760,000,000 / and = 2,700,000,000 /
in = 3,350,000,000 / is = 1,770,000,000 / that = 1,090,000,000 /
it = 1,170,000,000 / he = 259,000,000 / was = 550,000,000

Google have stop manipulate the number of the six first one and cut by two, at least, the number of results pages on the other six with the exception of the word "was" who is the only one to get is number gaining.

Seem Google have depreciate a lot their digits ! If you go to the post of Jean Veronis made in about the same time of my first one, you'll see a decrease between 20 to 75% in all the terms used by Jean with some little exception like Amazon, who get more than three time the number they've got in the end of january.

Yahoo Publisher Network to be release soon

I was talking about it last week, but it seem they've got to adjust the conceptual algo before to release officially the Yahoo! Publisher Network for small publishers.
Update: A bit weard to saw in the code of the page this :

...form name="ccoptin" action="http://ui.constantcontact.com/d.jsp" target="_blank" method="post">

Your email address will go to a Email Marketing company ? and not to Yahoo! where you can read this in the Privacy Policy :

This policy does not apply to the practices of companies that Yahoo! does not own or control, or to people that Yahoo! does not employ or manage.

A bit scary.

Google Cloaking : Ok for us, but not for you !

Google get caught by TreadWatch.org to bypass their own guidelines.

I also found another page where Google use the same tactic and stuffed another title tag!

Rumor mill on Google OS

Last year it was Jason, wednesday is was Dave reblog today by Nick. But may be it's for is API programming ? Will see !

Traditionnal media loosing a lot over Internet ads

For Viacom only, a $18 billion goodwill charge. The radio and outdoor advertising unit been delested of 10.9 and 7.1 billion bucks. But what not clear about this article is why and where the money goes ?

In this translate article you'll have more details like :

According to figures' published this week by the cabinet Interactive Advertising Office (IAB), the advertisers spent nearly 9,6 billion dollars on line in 2004, against 7,3 billion in 2003.

This heavy tendency obliges the traditional media, in particular the great groups of press, to develop in the Internet with the risk to see melting their principal source of income.

Good news for us.

Yahoo Gift

Youpi for me!



I have always dream, since I'm very young, to get a ice cream on a second day of march, and only for the second of march, and to go lick-it outside at 4 degree Farenheight (with the wind factor). It's a chance I'm at the south part of this country !

Where I can find it? Oups not at Baskin-Robbins site. Oups not at Yahoo-Local. Ok a find the good engine to locate-it :

Yahoo Contextual Ads is the gift ?

Yahoo annonce in her birthday page they will have a special treat for us tomorrow. I bet on those little green boxes wich mean Google AdSense will have competition. Via Waxy.

Also note Yahoo will replace the Overture brand by Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions wich imho is a good thing to consolidate the Yahoo! brand. Seem also Yahoo will be more permissive than Google with some niche market like tobacco.

Happy birthday Yahoo

They will turn 1o tomorrow. But today it's the developer who get the gift with a API service.
Update : I predict a lot more of applications for Yahoo over Google because the developer api use the simpler REST interface at the place of SOAP use by Google.