Christmas SERPs changes

These days I noticed a lot of change in Google's search ranking pages and results SERPs.
I think this may be due to :
1- Holidays season, Google tries to make top reasults , top trusted ... these days have black hat SEO techniques at maximum ! it will be very embaressing if a site manage to get to top for a world like "Christmas gifts"... I think Google now gives top results to old trusted websites only !

2- The new Google Caffeine with new algorithms.

Yesterday I made a search then made it the same search 2 minutes later, the results were different !!
So, the sure thing there is something changed in Google algorithms at least for now.

When Google Adsense recommend the 250 x 300 rectangle , it is realy honest

This post is after 1 month of variation and changes in Adsense placements, sizes and colors...
the over all notice is that the 300x250 rectangle which is recommended by Google is really the top CTR ad, the ads according to ctr are :
1- 300 x 250 rectangle
2- 336x300 rectangle
3- horizontal link units
4- 468x 60 banner
5- 768x90 leader board
6- others... vertical link units , square , button .... all the lowest

the best ctr according to colors :
(this I noticed a big variation from different countries, US and Europe visitors tend to click blended ads with no borders , same background as page, Middle east and others tend to click ads that are put on a very contrasted colors as a black back ground on a white page with yellow links !)

Best CTR according to placements
1- Header ... top of page best bellow title or H2 header tags
2- Inside content
3- Footer

After this trial I recommend very much every publisher to continuously change colors, placements and sizes of his ads until reach optimum ctr.

vBulletin wire tranfer bug

Yeap, while having so many purchase request vBulletin is having a problem in wire transfer orders.
I ordered a license and had this reply :

"Unfortunately there is a bug n our system regarding wire transfer payments and they cannot be processed. I have filed a bug report on this but there is no estimated time for this fix. I will flag this ticket and let you know when this is available. Very sorry for the inconvenience.

Best regards,
Steve Machol
Customer Support Manager, vBulletin"

Although payments are already processed from my account...
I hope this issue is solved ASAP ... vBulletin is a really wonderful script.

Longest time payment in progress in Adsense ever

Payment in progress .. 24 Sept, it may be the most annoying message an adsense publisher allover the world hate to read now! it has been 6 days, now it is the first of October in some countries and they have not been paid.
I normal months it took maximum 2 or 3 days in progress then payment is issued and publishers can happily get thier money at Western Union offices allover the world.
Some think it is a problem at Western Union not Google Adsense, others think it is due to Google employees are busy celebrating the Google's 11th birthday..lol
Also some bloggers wrote it is Google validating all accounts for violations and expecting lots of accounts to get banned (most silly thought I think).
Of course there must be an official announcement about this issue, yet nothing comes from Google ...

Update :
official comment on google blog :

Just wanted to let you know that our engineers are currently investigating the payment issue you've reported -- please visit our Known Issues page, where we'll continue to post updates as soon as we receive them.

-Arlene

also see

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92365

Pretty sure : Google dofollow rel="nofollow" links, BUT..

Now I am 99% sure that Google do follow nofollow links, however the page rank is not assigned.
this is done by :
I put a link of a page not indexed in Google, on a known website which was 100fm6.com, and the page was a profile on a social bookmarking new site.
the profile page was indexed soon the page on the website was crawled.
from my experience Google uses nofollow for only Page rank issue however it follow the links.
this means you should never use nofollow to link to a warez or non-friendly Google sites, Google knows exactly who you link to !

"show more results from" Google favors big sites

You may notice the new Google search feature : "show more results from" that allows the searcher to view related posts or articles on the same website.

this of course will increase the click through rate for sites showing "show more results from" and thus the will make they come up more in search results.

Has Google contributed in making the life better?

I think Google made its name in history and this will never change.
Google really contributed in improving the quality of life , how is that :
1- Google gives special respect to scientific research and education search results also there special engine developed for students.
2- Google is very successful on its trial to not show harmful results as porn and hacker in first results.

I think Google made the human life better, no one in any field of life can't make use of Google.