Blogger Hits

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.

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.

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.

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

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 !

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.

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.

It is very important to keep eye on what your website links to :

1- Many out going links is killing for famous websites this includes advertisments, there are millions of websites over the internet, now it is easy to get back links, you should know that you are passing page rank to every site you link to.

2- Linking to sites not liked by search engines as download sites, stolen software..etc. may get you out of search results

3- Do not provide advertising for any website, you should revise it, advertise only quality websites like adwords.

Once you had a site hitting top search results?
Now it is falling in SERPs?
search your fault among the following :

1- Pop-up advertising, after your site come up, you may find pop-up advertising effective in generating revenue, but it may cost a lot.
2- Copied content , no genuine content.
3- Errors in sitemap, very common.
4- Your site might be hacked?
5- your site is slow, many images or high code/text ratio.
6- links for you are removed from sites linking to you.
7- bad content : serials, cracks, music, movies downloads ... all goes down.

Many webmasters can observe obvious changes in search engine ranking positions specially at Google.
That is why fellows at webmasterworld.com are building a new thread every month to dicuss these changes, but are these really new factors driven to detect better results? or just changes in the websites?
Google said that positions depend on hundred of factors and new factors are added continuously, these updates can be followed on their webmaster Blog or twitter.

May be it is the main rule of universe : "change".

whatever done google will always be a machine and bad links may come up on first results, change is a must.

how to cope with this change?
currently google is focusing on website speed, it is necessary to make most of content in least space possible in kbs, this is good for SEO and for visitors, bounce rate and avg time on website.

Never think that your site made it to top search results, Google will never be a friend to a website while better one is out there, your site hitting top search results does not mean it can not be penalized or "sandboxed", google said there is no such thing.

I personally saw websites falling down after hiting the top at SERPs, main causes and faults are :
1- bad advertising : POP- Ups
2- Heavy pages
3- Keyword stuffing
4- Content : copyrighted content or hack related even if only a part of website.
5- selling links.

you must follow changes by google, try to make your website clean and fast, that's it.

yeap!
It is not always good to have back links from lot of sites :
1- if so many in short time it is considered spam
2- if many in long time not related to site activity and users, it is considered paid SEO
3- if from directory, mostly useless
4- if from unrelated site, totally useless

it is important to make the back links increase by flow, let your users give you back links.
if you are a blogger add social bookmarking gadgets, or give the link of the post or page in an html code area, as youtube for example...

You may find wordpress and blogspot results rank high in search results, that may annoy you at first if your competitor is a blogger and you paid much for your website.
so, do why blogs rank high?

1- blogs have low code to text ratio that is there is little code on page including javascript, css, flash or even images, this is loved by search engines.

2- static URLs, however Google announced it does not matter to have dynamic or static urls, but word press also offers keywords in URL and in many languages other than English, blogger however put keywords in urls in english language only.

3- No need to sitemap, labels and archives for blogs give almost all links to the blog, also there is some ways as links to develop a ready made sitemap, not needing to build them from th start

4- Wordpress or Blogspot have just strong link profile, it is great to have a site xxx.blogspot.com, your blog act as if it is a sub domain for this high page rank sites, so it is also very easy to get a high page rank from the start.

5- Blogspot automatically correct most HTML errors and notify for others, this limit html errors to minimum which is also appreciated by search engines.

6- wordpress have a very good tagging system, this enriches the pot keywords, and improve keyword density.

It is great to have a blog even you got your website, there is many success stories about blogging, now many bloggers are working from their home, just as me !!

Abdel Rahman Ellithy
owner of : http://100fm6.com/ and http://nogoomfm.blogspot.com/

Blogger Buzz: Blogger is Turning 10

Official Google Blog: Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson

Official Google Blog: Extending Google services in Africa

Blogger makes a link for every comment on your blog that is for a post like :
http://nogoomfm.blogspot.com/2009/05/blog-post_19.html
may get urls as :
http://nogoomfm.blogspot.com/2009/05/blog-post_19.html?showComment=1242753180000

this is a major problem for famous massively commented posts and blogs,
Here is the way you can solve it using the rel="canonical" attribute

1- Log in to your blogger Dashboard.
2- Choose Layout ( edit HTML template) and Download the template as backup.
3- Find :

</head>

4- Put before it the following code :

<!-- 100fm6.com block duplicate content START -->
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<link expr:href='data:blog.url' rel='canonical'/>
</b:if>
<!-- 100fm6.com block duplicate content END -->

5- Save your template.
Google uses re='canonical' hack in it blog too.

Read this post in arabic

After years of Yahoo ruling the internet by being the most visited site as classified by alexa, now Google rules : Google now is No 1 in alexa, comming before yahoo and msn, to be the most visited site over the internet.
It worth menthioning that a domain like google.com.eg or google.com.ca are different domains and treated differently on alexa !!!
This means a lot

I think there no such rule that not to make background color or to remove borders or to embed your ads inside your content, my theory is you should do these all together.
People are different kinds, some are interested to click ads because they know others just ignore ads if they look so.
The best thing is to put :
1 ad unit borderless and embedded inside content
1 ad unit with different background color than page
1 ad unit with borders and rounded corners for example

other thing is to distribute ads locations among pages that is to put one in header one in footer and one embedded for example (must not exceed 3 ad units), try not to put 2 ad units beside each other or that they appear on browser near without scrolling down.

Financial Crisis is hitting hard on AdSense publishers regarding earnings; with low CTR and eCPM
That is because there is decreasing number of advertisers and remaining advertisers are bidding so low.
The few number of ads. will have an impact on CTR where people does not see different ads so, decrease clicking.
I think this crisis will last for a long period, 5 or 6 months.
For me I have this month Jan 2009 : 1/3 eCPM of usual and 2/3 CTR of usual !!
this causes more than 1/2 cut of my monthly revenue from adsense.
I think the only solution now is to improve placements and colors and look forward, and be optimistic that this crisis will end as soon as possible.

God help us all.

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