Recently in Google Category

Got an interesting email in my inbox a few days ago.  Here's a copy of it:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we're continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We're focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We're bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we'll continue to launch new products and features. We're also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We'll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

This email is regarding the AdSense account associated with ca-pub-8234810200509513.

While it's nice that Google Adsense is concerned about the "recent economic turmoil" that we're going through, I have to admit that I'm really getting fed up with them. Time and time again, when I view my blog, all I see is adverts for Family Guy and Dungeons and Dragons stuff in the right sidebar. Granted posts about those subjects are fairly popular on this site, I serious doubt they're displaying to those folks interested in those topics.
 
Now I know I'm not supposed to tell you my percentages and I'm not going to. This site hasn't done that well with them. The Youtube video downloader simply in scale as it gets considering the number of hits each day it gets. And it gets a lot of them.  It kind of balances out and the other site supports this one.

Now I've tried tricks to get decent adverts to display. We used to get nothing but steak adverts here which did little good. I wrapped both the title line and the h1 tag line in code that told the Google Adsense bots to not look at that stuff and it pretty much worked. At least I rarely see them. But what do I see on my Gallery or Flickr? Post? You guess it. D&D and Family Guy. What a surprise.

I for one hope something can be done about this as I'm out of ideas.

Now I'm going to sit back and watch all the Google Adsense spam hit this post.  And, no, that's not why I wrote it.

Looks like Google may have updated their pageranks recently.  This site is still a zero I'm afraid (We used to float between 5 and 6) but yet we're fairly well listed and get added in fairly quickly.  We had a lot of problems with being seen by the Google Spiders which I wonder may have been the cause of that.  Seems to be fine now though.  Just need to get rid of that goose egg. (Or maybe we should call it a Google Egg?)

I've gone ahead and opened up the blog for comments without having to register first or use an outside login source or OpenID.  Being open like that has caused problems previously with folks leaving incorrect information and having no way to get back to them.  We shall see.

edit: You can lookup for page rank here and here.  So what does everybody else have for a page rank now?

reedit: Hmm, looks like my trackback didn't get recognized or it got caught over on imbloggingthat.com.  I've had issues recently with that.  Looks like I still maybe having them.  Not sure if they're being caught by some sort of spam protection or if it has something to do with sending a trackback from Movable Type to Wordpress.

Just got the following in my inbox.  Google Adsense has decided to return their referrer rates back to their older scale and to ditch the first level payouts. (The $5 kickback when someone you've signed up earned their first five bucks themselves.)

Gotta admit that I'm torn on this.  The $5 bounty was something that I was able to nab quite a few times, including one money where I earned more on bounties than I did on actual clicks.  Too many folks don't realize how hard it is to $100 within 180 days unless your site is targeted or has very heavily traffic.

Here's the email they sent out:

Hello AdSense publisher,

We are writing to share some important information with you about
referrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts to
optimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we are
constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as
well as tweaking those products already available to our
publishers.
In this spirit, we will be making some significant changes to
referrals for the AdSense program in the coming weeks.

As some of you may remember, in February 2007, as an experiment,
we raised the bounty paid (from $100 to $250) when a publisher you
refer brings in $100.  We have decided to conclude this experiment
and return to the original paid bounty amount of $100. In
addition, we will no longer be offering the $5 bounty for the
first $5 that a referred publisher brings in or the $2,000 bonus
for referring 25 publishers earning $100 or more in any 180 day
period. $100 will be the only bounty paid for referrals to the
AdSense program.

If you're currently displaying referral units on your site
directing users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for details
about what to expect in the coming weeks.

In early January, your AdSense account will be updated to only
note the $100 payment for referring users to AdSense. You will
continue to be paid under the current bounty structure ($5, $250,
$2,000) until late January, after which you will receive $100 once
a referred publisher brings in $100 within 180 days.

Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. We
apologize for any inconvenience this news may cause.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important new AdSense features.

Google hasn't indexed my site since April or so because it can't see my robots.txt file for some reason.

But yet Google Reader doesn't have any issue with pulling a feed from this site.

And MSN and Yahoo and the rest don't have any issue either.

It's really annoying.

I was recently checking with Google's Webmaster Tools to see if I was having any issues with this site. I discovered that every single page had an " robots.txt unreachable" error attached to it. Gotta admit that I was rather surprised when I saw that. I hadn't put in a robots.txt file when I moved over to Movable Type and really hadn't thought of it. I mean not having one in the past has never caused an issue in the past. Why should now be any different.

Imaging my surprise when I read the help file on the error:

Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn't crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, your robots.txt file was unreachable. To make sure we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl.

Now I state again that I didn't have a robots.txt file in place. Per that FAQ, a missing robots.txt file shouldn't be an issue but, for some reason, it was in this case. I quickly created an empty file within the backend and waited to see if it was resolved. It was.

Just wanted to pass that along. Hope it helps someone else with that issue.

Marge discovers why you should never google yourself