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Why you should not increase the number of articles on your homepage

This is a long title for an article, my apologies for that but I was not able to squeeze it into fewer words. Wordpress lets the administrator select the amount of preview articles that appear on the homepage and on every other page. The default value is ten which means that every page (blogurl/page/number) will contain that amount of articles specified.

Google and other Search Engines index those pages and users can find them when searching for keywords. Now, if you increase the amount of articles shown on one page one side effect can hurt your status in Google. Lets say you have 100 articles and a default value of 10 articles per page.

You have decided to raise that amount to 20 articles per page. This means that the last five pages that have been indexed by Google and other Search Engines are not existing anymore. blogurl/page/6 leads to a 404 not found error as do all other pages after that.

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Some thoughts about the new Google Adsense Ads

The new Adsense ads that saw a reduction in the area that can be clicked are live on most websites by now and first reports come in confirming that webmasters are seeing an decrease in click through rate, eCPM and revenue. Figures range from 5% to 40% so far and it is a bit early to judge if those decreases will remain like they are now. CPC seems to drop between 0-2% for most websites which is a huge decrease reflected in the income level.

Google is hoping that this move will show advertisers that they are indeed fighting for them battling invalid clicks that most likely will not lead to a sale. Their reasoning that advertisers might spend more money for advertisement if they see an increase in ROI could become true but publishers will most likely see a decrease even if advertisers add more to their spending budget.

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Google Adsense alters Ad Units

The following news could be devastating for a lot of webmasters who do use Google Adsense to monetize their website. Currently they do get paid when a user clicks anywhere on an Adsense ad which consist of a title, a description, the url and the background area.

The new ad format changes the content that can be clicked. Only the title and url can be clicked in those new ad units while the description and background are not clickable anymore. The intention is to reduce the amount of accidental clicks.

A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the users’ overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease

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Pagerank Checkup Tools fail across the board

All those nifty Pagerank Checking Scripts that are offered on literally hundreds of websites are failing to display any score at the moment. It does not matter which website is entered in the scripts all return a PR N/A on all datacenters which leads to the question of why this is currently happening.

I can think of three possibilities right now. First, Google changed something in their API which had the result that all of those scripts are failing right now. Another possibility would be that Google has some internal problems and can’t answer the scripts requests right at the moment.

The third possibility would be that Google decided to cut access to its datacenters to all Pagerank checking scripts by disallowing that this data is being pulled from them.

Whatever it is it is still on going and it surely will take some time until the World receives an official answer from Google.

Update:

It seems that some scripts are still working. One of them is Oyoy as confirmed by Andy Beard

Use Google Trends to your advantage

I’m sometimes in doubt about the correct keyword that I have to use in an article. This happened for instance in the past when I was writing about hard drives, or hard disks. I was not sure if I should use hard drives or hard disks in the article. Using both in the same article was out of question so I had to make a decision.

Instead of rolling some dices I decided to use Google Trends to take a look at the search volume for both terms and pick the term that would have a higher search volume. The higher search volume might not always be the best pick because it means usually that the competition is also using that term in favor of a lesser searched one.

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Will you continue selling links and reviews ?

Google decided to punish websites that are selling text links that are casting votes at the same time, which means that all sites not using the nofollow link attribute are in danger of loosing their current Pagerank. This puts services like Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe and Linkshare into serious danger.

It remains to be seen if they will start adding nofollow link attributes to the links that they sell but it does not look that way at the moment. Only the visible Pagerank is currently decreased which has no effect on search engine rankings.

What I don’t like is that it could very well be that Google decides that this punishment is not enough and decreases those rankings as well to further punish webmasters who are selling links. No one knows for sure and once the webmaster community finds out it is to late to react.

Some sites were punished for links that they had months ago but removed since then from their website. I would like to see a little bit more transparency here.

Why is a site getting punished and what should the site owner do to reverse the punishment ?

Many webmasters will most likely remove their websites, at least the ones that depend on Google, from Text-Link-Ads and the like. A PR4 site making some money from selling text links getting just a handful of visitors from search engines will most likely continue selling links. A site with thousands of visitors from search engines and an Google Adsense account most likely will not.

What is your stance on the matter ? Will you continue to sell links and reviews on your website ?

Commission Junction Module for ALinks

ALinks is a very useful plugin for Wordpress that allows the blog owner to define keywords and assign links to those keywords. The plugin then adds those links in realtime to the blog post which has several advantages. The first is that you do not have to edit several posts if a link to a website has changed. The same holds true if you want to change the advertisement.

Lets assume you promoted an iPod summer special which recently ran out. Instead of editing the links in your blog posts you simply change the url of the keyword once from within your Wordpress admin panel.

We all know that context related advertisement works much better than banners that are placed somewhere on the outside of the article. Let me give you another example to explain what Alinks really does.

The first step is to select a keyword which can be one word or a phrase and use one of the modules available to add a link. Modules are tiny forms that are used to create special links. There is one module for general links which would mean that you can enter a url and the keyword would automatically be converted to a link to that url.

Other possibilities are Clickbank, Linkshare and Amazon links that can be added as easily. One thing that was missing though was a module for Commission Junction links which I created and added to my list of modules.

Commission Junction uses a combination of links and images that have to be added to be valid and earn for you. My Alinks Commission Junction module lets you add the image url and the link url so that both are added when you add new keywords.

I’m using this Alinks module to create specific links to keyword phrases and it is working very fine. The only problem is that there is some whitespace after the link because of the image that is added afterwards. The image is only 1 pixel in size but the space is visible.

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Download Alinks Commission Junction Module
Download Alinks Plugin

Do small sites profit from Spotplex ?

Spotplex is a relative new service that indexes articles from websites that have a small javascript implemented. So what does it do ? It ranks articles based on their views on the writers website which puts websites with many visitors in a natural advantage and small sites at a natural disadvantage. Popular articles, that is articles with the most views are shown in prominent places on Spotplex while articles of smaller sites make it rarely to those places.

They can still be found by searching for tags but I suppose the effect on traffic is not that enormous. Does it make sense for small sites to implement the javascript code from Spotplex at all ? Let me answer it this way. I don’t think it would harm the site in any way which means: yes, do it. Even if you receive a few hits per day it is worth the implementation. It will grow more with your site growing and with Spotplex becoming more popular in the long run.

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Use Onlywire to drive traffic to your site

Onlywire is a service that was introduced to me by a friend. It lets you create a wonderful bookmarklet that when pressed submits the active page to more than a dozen social bookmarking sites including del.icio.us, furl and diigo. Before I knew of this bookmarklet I submitted my articles only occasionally to social bookmarking sites. With onlywire I do it for every article because it is a fast and easy process.

You only have to supply the tags by yourself, everything else is done by onlywire. You do need accounts at the various sites however but this is done in about 30 minutes and you are logged in automatically using the onlywire service from then on.

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