SEO UPDATES

Google announced that the AdSense program now supports the use of 200 channels:

If you weren’t sure how you were going to track the performance of all of your new pages, your worries are over! We’ve increased the number of AdSense channels available to you, up to 200 active channels at any one time. Use your extra channels to compare the performance of your different ad units, of various page layouts, or to track the results of your optimization experiments.

For those who’re very new at using AdSense and haven’t perused this matter yet, channels are used to track your ads performances:

Channels provide you with a way to view detailed reporting about the performance of your pages. By assigning a channel to any combination of pages, you can track a variety of metrics across your sites. [...] You can even assign a channel to each of your separate domains, to see where your clicks are coming from.

With 200 active channels at any time, advertisers now indeed have more options available to perform their tracking.

Sorry there haven’t been too many updates around here lately… If you’d like to try your hand at blogging on Search Engine / SEO news, we’d love to have ya join us here on the Niner Niner network and SEO Updates.

You can signup to write for Niner Niner over on the Signup Page, beta password is: niner

Now, onto some AdSense news from a few days ago (in case ya misted it!):

JenSense broke the story of Google’s own AdSense page being hijacked in the SERPS of Google.

This is just silly. Someone thinks they can hijacks a Google page get away with it? LOL. Not.

Jen sez:

When you decide to hijack a site in the Google serps, it makes sense to do one that will benefit you in some way, while not raising yourself too high on the search engine’s radar. So, it obviously makes perfect sense to go and hijack the Google AdSense site

This is the best though. Kevin at All-In-One-Business.com replies back in the comments:

I want to thank JenSense and others for posting this thread.

Thanks for the comment Air Charter. I just got off the phone with two different tech writers explaining why I would have a meta redirect on my site.

It isn’t an attempt to profit from either Google’s page rank or some cloaked affiliate link.

I am no hijacker. In fact, I’m not sure how I could in any way benefit from this link.

The simple fact is this: I write and syndicate articles all over the web. I used to put into those articles direct links to sites I was talking about.

A couple years ago I had a problem when I had written and syndicated several articles about GoTo.com when they changed their name to Overture. There were dozens of websites to notify and ask them to update the links in my articles.

So I decided to begin using meta refresh redirects rather than listing the URL’s directly. I can then keep the links current in all the articles I write.

Hopefully Google will look at this and decide to make some changes so this won’t occur. It’s hard to believe I got a number 1 listing without trying.

Can anyone these days ever just admit when they’ve f’d up and come clean? Feh.

JenSense reports that Adwords advertisers can now negative filter publisher sites:

AdWords advertisers now have the ability to add AdSense publisher websites to a new tool called “Campaign Negative Sites”. This means that advertisers who have one or two websites they wish not to have their ads appear on (whether they are competitor sites or just sites they deem as lower quality) can now easily add those URLs to the filter, and their ads will no longer show on those sites, while still be able to run unaffected on all other publisher sites.

I have been a beta tester of this awesome feature, and am very happy to see it finally released to everyone - for both the advertiser and the publisher benefits. Speaking from experience, it works very well, as other advertisers will hopefully be discovering too.

Sounds like a great way to increase your AdWords ROI and keep your ads off of low-quality “webspam” sites, etc.

(via SEO Book)

Andi Baio broke another webspam story recently, this time on Syndic8 hosting articles on their various sub-domains.

An update on the article reads:

May 6, 2005: Philipp Lenssen reports that Syndic8.com was removed from Google’s index entirely. By e-mail, a Google engineer also confirmed that the Google AdSense account for Syndic8’s ad affiliate was terminated.

I agree with Aaron Wall in the comments, who states that it’s Google’s responsibility to make sure people aren’t cheating AdSense. If their quality control for the AdSense program was more rigorous, this wouldn’t be an issue. They’re passively supporting this practice by allowing people to profit off it.

Ouch! That’s pretty harsh, but I guess they had to make a lesson out of someone for all this “webspam” + AdSense that’s floating around out there.

Via webmaster world:

To create your own pretty charts, simply follow these quick instructions:
1) Download your CSV file from Google (its above every report you can make) I recommend taking the “All Time” report because if gives a larger sample size.
2) Open Microsoft Excel or a similar spreadsheet application. These instructions are really for Excel, but most spreadsheet packages are similar.
3) Open the CSV file in Excel, you’ll have a table of figures.
4) Delete only the column heading marked “Date” (for some reason this messes charts up) (don’t delete the entire column or you can’t tell what you’ve done over time!)
5) Delete the rows at the bottom of your sheet that indicate Totals. (otherwise you have a spike at the end of your graph which makes everything else hard to interpret)
6) Highlight column A (should be date) and highlight column B (most likely to be Page impressions) and go to Insert > Chart. Go through the wizard (its really simple) looking at the lovely charts you can make. Settle on the first bog standard line graph. Next, Next, Next, until you hit the part that asks where you want to create it (in the current worksheet- no, or in a new worksheet- yes!) Click Finish and bang! Instant charts.
7) Now repeat for A+C, A+D, A+E and A+F.
Save to disk, then print. Analyse, marvel and plot for world domination.
9) Profit! (okay, I had to do that).

Just came across this great thread on Webmaster World.

If you are running AdSense on your website, and haven’t yet experimented with the new Ad Links unit, you should definitely give the entire thread a good read.

Some highlights:

I have tried AdLinks in two different locations on a 3 column layout:
(a) middle of right column
(b) top of left column (just above site navigation)
Results:
1. Location (b) receives 5 times as many clicks as location (a).
2. Location (b) has increased total earnings by 125% whereas location
(a) made no noticable change to anything.

And this comment:

I included Ad Links as soon as it came out and so far I’m very impressed.
Targeting spot on which is good for publisher and advertiser alike and earnings up more than 32%!

We’ll see how it pans out for the rest of the month to judge whether it’s the novelty factor or an accepted more highly focussed results page for the visitor.

Anywhere from 32% to 125% isn’t bad!

There seems to be a bit of confusion regarding the CTRs (click-thru ratios) for Ad Links, and when you actually get paid.

Google only makes money (and hence you only get paid), when the visitor clicks through on the second link via the Google Ad Link results page.

It’s key that you implement Ad Links effectively, otherwise it’s possible that your CTRs will drop and you will be penalized under this new Smart Pricing thing that Google has going. (This is all just from the thread - the Smart Pricing thing seems to be in beta or alpha stage - details are sketchy.)

Good luck! I’ll report back with my results in a week or two, after trying out a few Ad Links formats on some of the new Niner sites.