Some thoughts about the new Google Adsense Ads
November 16, 2007 by martin
Filed under adsense, make money
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.
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
Will you continue selling links and reviews ?
October 31, 2007 by martin
Filed under links, make money
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 ?
Adsense Smart Pricing
January 29, 2007 by martin
Filed under adsense, make money
You might have heard that Google introduced a feature called smart pricing to Adsense some time ago. Smart Pricing is supposed to punish websites that have a bad ctr by reducing the amount of money a click on the ads earns the webmaster. The most disturbing feature of smart pricing however is the fact that not only the ad units on that website are affected but all the sites in the account of the owner of the adsense id.
This means that if you have adsense on a big forum with a low ctr and bad feedback from advertisers your whole account might experience the effect of smart pricing. Everton from connected internet is trying an experiment and reduce poor performing ad units on his network of sites and monitor the results over the course of months. It will be interesting to see if there have been indeed changes to the better because of this.
About Monetizr
I bet the first question that comes to your mind is why the hell does the world need another monetization blog if there already exist such great established blogs like problogger or entrepeneurs journey. Those two blogs are really great and I have them in my feed reader because their are actually essential. What they are missing though is something that I would like to add with my blog.
I try to write for guys like you, guys with dreams of making money online, with blogs that have no or only limited success until now. It is actually pretty easy to become a semi-problogger making money from your blog. And this is the main difference that I want to lay emphasize on. My audience is everyone who wants to reach a certain level and not the guys who are already on that level.