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.

To avoid this you should never increase the amount of articles that are listed on one page in Wordpress. Reducing the amount would mean on the other hand that more pages would be indexed.

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.

The reason why publishers will not see an increase is simple. Why should advertisers raise the bid price for a keyword if those keywords start bringing in great revenue right now. The only thing that is most likely going to happen is that they add more budget to get more clicks in for their products that sell better than before.

Publishers on the other hand can not provide more ad space which means that they will not profit from it at all. That is at least my theory and it would be nice if I would be wrong here.

What’s really bugging me is that many publishers do not have an alternative to Adsense. Sure, US publishers might go with Yahoo but what if you have a general, not product related blog ? Affiliate systems do not work well on those blogs and advertising systems like Chitika also perform miserably.

Where is a real alternative that everyone could live with ?

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

Amit from Digital Inspiration who received the email from his Adsense rep understood it differently. His understanding was that all areas remain clickable but clicks on the background or description would not be paid by Google.

This would be utterly awful and I hope that my reading of the email that he received is the correct one. Publishers will most likely see a CTR reduction and most likely also a reduction in ECPM and overall earnings.

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

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.

As you can see in the image above the term hard drives was searched more often than the term hard disks. I therefor decided to go with it.

Using Google Trends is pretty basic. You simply add all terms in the search box, separating each term with a comma. Google calculates the results and displays them neatly in a graph.

Read More:

Google Trends

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 ?

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.

Read More:

Download Alinks Commission Junction Module
Download Alinks Plugin

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.

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.