The removal of all eBay advertising from Google began when Google attempted to crash eBay’s user conference, in Boston, this week.  eBay is holding their annual user conference, this week, in Boston.  Google, in an effort to promote their Google Checkout program, unveiled plans for the Google Checkout Freedom Party.  The event was intended to try to convince eBay - via lobby from eBay users - to start accepting Google’s Checkout, a direct rival of eBay-owned PayPal (eBay has banned Google Checkout from their system, stating that it has yet to prove itself in fraud protection).  All attendees of eBay’s user conference were given special invitations to attend Google’s Checkout Freedom Party, for free food, free drinks, and free massages.

Google backed down at the last second, when eBay expressed serious reservations, publicly, about the Google event, and Google’s actions toward the advertising partnership.  On Wednesday Google canceled the event, only one day before it was to take place several blocks (a quick trolley ride) away from the eBay event.  Google’s blog stated that, “eBay Live attendees have plenty of activities to keep them busy this week in Boston, and we did not want to detract from that activity. After speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live conference.”

Spokespersons for both companies have made a few choice comments on the issue:

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, declined to say whether his company pulled advertising on Google in retaliation for the party. But he did voice disappointment in Google for the event, saying, “We didn’t think it was the way for one partner to treat another.”

Durzy decided to cast the advertising freeze as an experiment, news articles say, in an attempt to see if the money eBay has been using on Google will yield better results, elsewhere.  Neither Durzy, nor any other eBay representative, has mentioned where eBay will next advertise.

Derek Brown, an analyst for Carter Fitzgerald, stated, “We’ve seen that the two companies (eBay and Google)  have been on a collision course for a long time.  This seems to be the latest and most bizarre twist.”

eBay’s advertising funds were withdrawn from Google, this past monday, and AdSense publishers are already feeling the pinch.  Although the majority of eBay ads were relatively low cost per click (most in the two to five cent range), eBay was still Google’s biggest advertiser.  According to comScore Networks, eBay’s ads showed up on Google a whopping 188.3 million times in March.  More than double the number shown by Target, Google’s second largest (now first) advertiser.

What does this mean for AdSense sellers?  Those profiting off of eBay-related AdSense sites will find themselves in a sudden financial loss.  Publishers whose sites deal with specific products, auctions in general, and/or brand specific information, will find a good portion of the advertising on their site has disappeared.

In some cases, this may be a windfall for some publishers.  Almost every publisher would have had eBay ads on his or her website a few times a day, regardless of the theme.  Now the eBay ads that were so prevalent, and out of place, will be replaced with more highly targeted ads with potentially greater cost per click.

It will be interesting to see how this affects each individual publisher’s income.  This particular publisher has noticed a slight increase on one site, and a noticeable increase on another.  Time will tell how well publishers will fare with the loss of Google’s largest advertiser.

Technorati Tags: Google, eBay, AdSense, eBay User Conference, Google Checkout, Google Checkout Freedom Party, Target, PayPal

Go check out the Google International Zeitgeist for information on who is searching for what, from where.  You’ll be surprised.

According to the Google AdSense Terms of Service:

Participating in Google AdSense does not affect your site’s rank in Google search results and will not affect the search results we deliver. Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers broad access to content across the web. Our search results are unbiased by our relationships with paying advertisers and publishers. We will continue to show search results according to our PageRank technology.

Adding the Google AdSense ad code or AdSense for search code to your site will not queue your pages for crawling by our main index bots. While our bot (starting with ‘Mediapartners-Google’) does crawl content pages for the purpose of targeting ads, this crawl is not associated with our main index crawl.

…What could this mean for publishers?  It’s possible that you could end up with a duplicate content problem, especially if you use a special template to serve data to the AdSense crawler.  On the upshot, it may mean that AdSense publishers will find themselves added to the Google Index more quickly and readily than non-adsense publishers.  …Makes you wonder if this will affect PR, and/or if this would be affected by the Google Sandbox.

It is possible that there was an accidental cross-over issue taking place between AdSense and the search index.  I’ll keep following the issue, and see what pops up.

Technorati Tags: mediapartners-Google/2.1, GoogleBot, AdSenseBot Share This ]]> http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/04/18/adsense-mediapartners-crawlerbot-adding-to-google-index/feed/ http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/04/18/page-rank-explained/ http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/04/18/page-rank-explained/#comments Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:08:46 +0000 Fyre http://www.fyreplace.com/?p=446 Ian Rogers has written a very nice paper, explaining Google’s page rank system.  He includes the formulas, as well as real-world examples, explaining how things break down.  Someone who read over this document several times, and spent a good while working it out on paper, could probably come up with an excellent - and “legal” - method to dramatically increase their page rank.

…and within a month Google would figure it out and compensate…

[tag]Google, Page Rank, Page Rank Explained[/tags]

First, they have brought back the old style single-page AdSense code generator. When going to AdSense Setup, and selectiong AdSense for Content, you now have the option of using the wizard, or the single-page method.

Secondly, AdSense had changed the reporting of the CTR amounts to two decimal places. It’s a smal change, but it allows you a better grasp of the true CTR. Although programs like the AdSense notifier, etc… will still round up, meaning your 1.57% will display as 1.6%.

Thirdly, Google has added an AdWords referral program for its AdSense publishers.

By using a button, much like the one to the left of this paragraph, you are able to allow people to sign up with AdWords through your affiliate link. Once the new sign up has spent at least $100 (within 90 days), your account is credited with $20.

…yeah, I thought that seemed pretty low, myself. JenSense believes it’s because the old Adwords affiliate program (for Adwords members) was a $20 credit when the new folks spent $20. When they didn’t elect to change that, I’ll never know. The other factor is the 90 day time limit. Then again, spending $100 in 90 days is pretty danged easy in AdWords. My proposed budget for the initial AdWords marketting campaign for my up and coming website, was $500 in 90 days. Not too shabby, eh?

So, go and enjoy all of the new AdSense toys… If you don’t yet have AdSense, well, what’s keeping you? Go and sign up:

The Google Blog was unavailable for a short time tonight. We quickly learned from our initial investigation that there was no systemwide vulnerability for Blogger. We’ll let you know more about what did happen once we finish looking into it.

The truly amusing thing is the update to that post:

Update: We’ve determined the cause of tonight’s outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d’oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

Oh that’s cute.  Just delete your own blog, Google.

That “other user” that temporarily claimed the blog address was nice enough to give it back to Google.  See, there’s a unique thing in Blogger.  The <em>instant</em> you delete your blog, your .blogspot.com sub domain becomes available to anyone who wants it.  Oh, if you move from hosting at blogspot.com, and go to using Blogger’s FTP publishing, then your blogspot.com domain disappears and it available again, too.  heh.

I just find it amusing that Google would screw up like that.  I wonder how long it took them to re-load everything from the database backups, and how much they actually lost.

Technorati Tags: google, google blog, official google blog, google hacked Share This ]]> http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/03/29/google-google-blog-snafu/feed/ http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/03/26/googles-index-is-fickle/ http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/03/26/googles-index-is-fickle/#comments Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:09:56 +0000 Fyre http://www.fyreplace.com/?p=424 Google’s indexing of my domain is being very fickle, lately.  I wonder if it’s the same for everyone?

Recently, I reported that Google had dropped 54 pages from its index, and 277 back links.  I then updated showing a decline in pages indexed, but a recoup of back links.

I’ve been checking my stats on this issue, over the past sixteen days (since originally reporting it), and have discovered an amusing trend.  Google is very fickle.  The graphs will help explain this.

Let’s start with the pages indexed:

As you can see, when I first signed up for tracking, Google was indexing about 230 of my pages.  Over time, that total rose to around 283, before beginning a dramatic - and rapid - decline.  Eventually, I got as low as 163
pages indexed, a total of 120 pages less than the highest point.  Over the past couple of days, I’ve seen a recovery in the number of indexed pages, and today I saw a huge jump, back up to 250 pages.  To the best of my knowledge, there was no reason for Google to suddenly drop any of my pages from its index.  Evidentially this is true, as they’ve re-indexed several pages in the last few days.

Google’s “back links” are just as fickle, as is evident in this image.  I have had a steady 288 back links, since I joined.  Once, I went to 293 - for a single day.  Twice, now, Google has suddenly claimed to have
no back links, what-so-ever, for my domain.  It’s simply amusing to see this happen.  It’s disconcerting, though, when I notice the links disappear.  In this case, however, it is possible that Google is simply having data retrieval issues when queried for this information.  I doubt that is the case in the page indexing, above.

Here’s yet another graph pointing out Google’s fickle indexing.  As you can see, my back links from blogs have been steadily increasing.  That is, except for one day when they took a sharp dive, down
almost twenty links.  Certainly, the next day, they recovered.  However, the sudden drop is very telling.  It is possible, I suppose, that the drop in back links from blogs can be explained away if Google had removed a blog or two from its database - temporarily, of course.

It just doesn’t make sense to me why Google seems to random - especially on page indexing.  I’ve checked the stats, myself, at google.com, and have discovered that, yes, they really are accurate.  The only non-accurate reporting has been in the general back links, where the report shows zero, yet google.com shows the appropriate number of 288.  Although that is most likely a data retrieval glitch, it does not explain the issues being page indexing and blog back links.

I’ll keep track of these graphs for another couple of weeks, and then report on Google’s performance, again.

Please help spread the news and digg this post.

Over the past few days, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend…

March 7th: 281 pages indexed, 288 back links, 232 links from blogs.
March 8th: 251 pages indexed, 146 back links, 236 links from blogs.
March 9th: 227 pages indexed, 11 back links, 238 links form blogs.

In three days, Google dropped 54 pages from its index, and droped 277 back links!!  (Amusingly, my links from blogs increased by six links.)  That’s an absolutely astounding number, and it makes me wonder what the hell is going on.  There is no reason for Google to slap me in the sandbox, all of a sudden.  All of my sites hosted on the fyreplace.com domain have AdSense enabled, and are submitted (and regularly updated) to the Google SiteMaps system.

The drop in index pages doesn’t particularly bother me, as Google could easily be dropping the old forums that I used to run from their index (50 - 75 pages would be about right), but I can’t figure out why they dropped 277 back links.  No one linked to the forums, so that makes no sense.  Something like this is, to me, a sign that Google may be getting ready to drop me from their index.  An astonishing thought, considering I went up in PR, at the last update.  Additionally, I have done nothing to make them think I am a splog or spammer.  Your guess is as good as mine why this is happening, but - well - there it is.  Time will tell, I suppose.  I’ll update any significant changes over the next few days.

UPDATE:
The very next day, Google had dropped 12 more pages from their index, but my back links were back up to 288 (the original number).  Two days later (the March 12th report) shows that Google dropped yet another 23 pages from their index, down to 192 pages.  That’s less than the total number of blog posts on this blog.  Needless to say, I’m a little upset, and still wondering what the hell is going on.

The settlement applies to any advertiser showing fraudulent charges back to 1992.  Advertisers will be eligible for an account credit than can be used towards future Google ads.  Unfortunately, the total value of credit available will be less than the proffered $90 million, as Google must pay for attorneys fees for the plaintiff (Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles).  Yahoo is also named in the suit, although they have voiced their intention to fight the charges, rather than settle.

Google issued the following statement to Search Engine Watch:

We are proposing a settlement with the plaintiffs in this case. The proposal would allow advertisers to apply for credits for clicks they believe were not valid. Specific details of the settlement will remain confidential until it is presented to the judge. We do not know how many advertisers will apply and receive credits, but the total amount, including the legal fees determined by the judge, will not exceed $90 million.

When asked about their thoughts on the case, a Yahoo spokesperson stated:

We cannot comment on Google’s reported settlement. That said, we stand firmly by our proprietary click protection system, and look forward to vigorously defending our position in this matter

Several questions were raised by Search Engine Watch.  As expected, the majority of the responses boiled down to "no comment."  It remains to be seen whether Google will make any changes to its click protection schemes, and whether or not this will affect AdSense advertisers in any way.

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I love Blogger’s error messages.  They’re so informative.  Amusingly, their status page has no information on this issue.

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Over the next two days, almost every Google-indexed website will find its PR updated.  Some will go up, some will go down, and some will stay where they are.  This, however, is the telling time for how your blog is doing in Google’s eyes.  For instance, I was a PR4 before this update, I was projected to go to a PR6, and am currently a PR5.  I don’t know if I’ll rise again before this is through or not.  Doubtful.  Remember, though, if you’re a fairly new blog, you probably won’t
have a PR this time around.  Not to worry, you’ll be picked up the next round, most likely.  (For instance, my political blog, MindSpeak, does not have a PR in this round of updates, even though it has been indexed and appears in the search results.)

Enjoy the apprehension, the tension, and the joy of watching a number rise by a single digit, getting you closer to that all-powerful 10.  Drop a comment and tell me what your PR has risen to, this update cycle.

No, despite sound like it, this is not the opening to an infomercial. It appears some Blogger users are having a variety of problems with their RSS feeds. Primarily, this issue is affecting lower traffic blogs hosted on Blogger’s servers; although some high-traffic blogs - as well as self-hosted blogs powered by Blogger’s FTP system - have noticed the problem as well.

For example, Newsome.org has reported having issues with the RSS feed, particularly through Bloglines. Today, however, I noticed the reported issue in my feed reader (Thunderbird). Kent uses Bloggers FTP publishing ability to publish his blog to his own domain/website, and supposedly should not be affected by the issues.

So what, exactly, is going on? Welll….

There are a lot of rumors floating about amongst the techno-pundits (and those “in the know” (including from an individual who works for Google, who wishes to remain nameless (I know them only by their IRC nym, anyway))) that Google is attempting to save bandwith. How? By converting entries in RSS feeds on the Blogger service to partial text/excerpts. Mostly, this is done after a certain date, although supposedly the amount of time varies, depending on how popular the blog is. More popular blogs experience the issue sooner than less popular ones. It’s unknown whehter or not this is affecting FTP published blogs. It is also unknown whether or not this is happening to all blogger blogs.

By converting feeds to excerpts, Google saves on bandwith consumption, as fewer bytes of data are being transmitted each time the feed is polled.

Please keep in mind that I can not confirm this is happening, but then again, neither can anyone else. The information I’ve obtained has been through conversations in a tech-oriented chat room, with individuals that are active in the blogosphere, and technosphere. These individuals included people from all walks, online, including one Google employee. The Google employee, however, has not seen any concrete evidence from his/her employer that specifies whether or not this is a glitch, or truly something Google is doing.

There’s no doubt that this issue is appearing on Blogger blogs. The question is whether or not Google is doing it on purpose (to save bandwith, perhaps), or if it is just a glitch in Blogger.

It seems that Duncan, the webmaster of The Herald, noticed that Google’s Adsense was displaying an ad that promoted Splogs (Spam Blogs). Duncan went to view the website in the ad, and found the following in the first few lines of the page:

So how does BloggerGenerator help you?
Create blogs EXTREMELY fast, up to 15 blogs a minute just using one instance of the program. (You can open up multiple instances of the program for faster blog creation.)
Automatically change the Blogger template from NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW to INDEX,FOLLOW. This tells the search engine spiders to INDEX the blog and FOLLOW the links on the page. This is what really helps with getting indexed by Google.

I’ve got to admit, I think Google’s really sold out on this one, folks. They’re allowing promotion for the thing they’re supposedly trying to get rid of. Not only that, the program is for use on their own site, Blogger.com. What’s next?
Technorati Tags: Google, Adsense Share This ]]> http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/02/08/google-adsense-has-sunk-to-a-new-low/feed/ http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/02/07/google-google-to-release-linux-distribution/ http://www.fyreplace.com/2006/02/07/google-google-to-release-linux-distribution/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:47:36 +0000 Fyre http://www.fyreplace.com/?p=319 According to The Register, Google is working on a Linux distribution called Goobuntu. Three guesses what it’s built off of (Ubuntu).

It is speculated that Google is planning to take on Microsoft at Microsoft’s own game - Desktop OS.

From The Register:

Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business - desktop software.

A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as ‘Goobuntu’.

Google has confirmed it is working on a desktop linux project called Goobuntu, but declined to supply further details, including what the project is for.

Michael Nguyen, over at Social Patterns was the first to report this (that I’ve seen). Michael also has a few comments on Linux:

Linux has consistently run into usability problems and thus been generally delegated as a server operating system.

I’m guessing Michael is not a Linux user.

I’ve used Linux as both a server OS and a desktop OS. Although earlier versions and distributions had issues on the desktop side, the newer versions - such as Ubuntu, Mepis, etc - have shown great promise, and have much, much fewer issues than the Linux of old. I’ve had a dual-boot system on both my laptop and desktop between XP and Linux for quite some time, now. Although I have yet to completely switch to Linux, I do use it on occasion. (I’m simply an old dog. It’s hard to teach me a new Desktop OS.) Throughout my use of Linux, I’ve had few problems. None with the packaged applications, and very very few with the other apps. Applications that can install via programs like Debian’s apt-get - which automatically install dependencies - are a breeze to install and use. Add to the fact that you can install Linux, and have everything that you have under Windows (or the equivalent) for free, and you’ve got a heck of an OS.

Look for something interesting when Google releases Goobuntu.

For example. In searching for the phrase “pigeon rank” (for an earlier entry), the first link is “Google Technology.” It used to be that the URL for that link would have simply been “http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html”. Now, however, there is a lot of miscellanious code implanted, and the link reads “http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html&ei=SOXnQ4_CBK_wiQHvv4i5Cw&sig2=SxsfFZx17zJ_ZJKhYBtI5w”.

Why, pray tell, is Google tracking every click I make on search results? I am not now, nor have I ever been set up for Google’s personalized search program. In fact, I made certain I had opted out of it. Yet, whenever I am signed in on Google, they appear to be tracking my clicks on search results - even after I specifically selected options telling the system not to track said clicks.

Is this merely a bug, or is Google getting away from its “don’t do evil” motto?

However, if you look further down his page (what would normally be “below the fold” for most people (I run at a rediculously high resolution), you see ads that look very much like AdSense. They aren’t, however, as the “Ads by Yahoo!” statement, clearly points out. The image below shows what I’m talking about:

I just find it amusing that you would use a Google referral banner on a website that has Yahoo ads. In fact, wouldn’t that somehow be against the terms of service for one of the companies (if not both)?

Just one of those amusing things.

(Before anyone accusses me of using two seperate images, here’s the full page with only minor modifications (I’ve dimmed the page, except for the apporpriate areas, and drawn a little arrow. Since the image is so large, you can click here to see it, and it will open in a new window/tab. Alternatively, you can go to http://elliottback.com and take a look.)

Whether this is a result of having my sitemap published and dynamically updated (wordpress plugin) at Google Sitemaps, or not, I don’t know. Regardless, that’s a blazing fast response, in my opinion. Especially if you consider that I’m nowhere near a top performer with Adsense (have yet to get my first check). Those Adsense spiders are quick!

Google has been cracking down on websites which use trademarked terms like “Google” or “AdSense” in the domain name. They have been sending letters to publishers indicating that this is a TOS violation and that AdSense can no longer be used on the site.

Google will also provide technical assistance so AOL can create Web pages that will appear more prominently in the search results list. But this assistance will not change computer formulas that determine the order in which pages are listed in Google’s search results.

If Google engineers, who know the “computer formulas” are giving technical assistance, this means that they will have an unfair advantage over other publishers in getting good results in the SERPs. Other publishers need to guess what SEO techniques work best on websites. If AOL knows what works best they will do better than everyone else.

To me this goes against Google’s philosophy of always providing the most “natural” results as possible in their search results.

I completely agree.  With Google giving AOL “technical assistance,” then AOL will have the jackpot.  People who completely understand Google’s page rank algorythms, who are required to make sure that AOL’s pages are 100% wonderfully compliant with Google’s ranking systems.

After trying hard to keep my blog, and especially my company websites, compliant with current SEO techniques, to get into the higher rankings, I have to say, I’m pissed off.  This has been a really bad move on Google’s part, all the way around.  They’re going to create an online PR (and I don’t mean “page rank”) nightmare for themselves.  If YPN wasn’t having such major issues with proper contextualizing, I’d consider switching.

Bad Google!  No donut!