I’m sorta a bit late finally posting that I’m back from Vegas Pubcon.  But what a trip it was.  I had a great time meeting alot of new people and also able to spend time with some old friends.

I also met some new faces from Google.  I think someone is spreading rumors about me because the two new Google engineers (at least they were new to me) that I met gave me the coldest of conversations.  Ok maybe I shouldn’t have offered to help better explain their algo to them (that was a bit rude) but I was just having fun and the other Google employee that was with us laughed.  And I even helped a nice lady that was having a problem figuring out why her UK clients website is no longer getting any UK traffic after she 301′d it to a .com and moved the hosting to an American company. Read the rest of this entry »

I am having a great Friday morning.  I am truly giggling myself to death.  Why you ask?  Well because I did the right thing and was a nice guy and showed someone how 35,000 of their backlinks were accidentally misplaced.  I could have ignored it but I decided to pass it on as free advice besides I found it very funny that a mistake this big would not have been caught by themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

DMOZ has been broken for the last three weeks.  They uploaded an old dataset so the public could still search.  But all editor functions and site submissions have been offline.  In other words there is currently no chance in getting a new link from DMOZ.

What is a link monkey supposed to do?  Read the rest of this entry »

Here are the some facts from Google’s Q2 2006 SEC Filing

Google made a significant profit (Q2 2006 $721,077,000) and 98.9% of their revenue is from online advertising.  Of all Google advertising revenue 41% (Q2 2006 $996,567,000) was generated by the Google Network web sites which are sites not owned by Google by rather third parties. 

According to the SEC filing, the traffic acquistion cost Google paid their network of sites was 78% (Q2 $785,200,000) of the advertising revenue they raised which leaves Google with $211,367,000 of revenue from their network of sites to pay operating and marketing costs. 

Which leads me to assume/guess:

20%-30% of all Google profit is from Adsense.  This assumes that Adsense makes up a majority of the Google Network web sites and that Adsense operating costs are less than 30%.

Previously people speculated that Google shared 50% of revenue to sites participating in Google Adsense.  Their traffic acquistion costs which is 78% of advertising revenue suggest that they may be paying more than 50%.  Google does have some private deals which could also explain why the traffic acquistion cost is much higher than 50%.

Assuming Adsense is the lion share of Google’s network sites and that Adsense has operating costs of 30% then if click fraud is:

Please remember I am just a simple webmaster who is not into finance or SEC filings.  These are just my personal assumptions and guesses based on what I saw in the SEC filings.  Let me know what you think.

I am in heaven.  You see I LOVE potatoes and my wife hates them.  So I avoid making potatoes at home which means I only get potatoes when I eat out.  On Friday night I had a dinner appointment at a nice restaurant and much to the shock of the waiter I ordered their entire selection of potatoes.  That’s right I wanted a tasting of all of their different potato dishes.  Don’t act like you have never made a crazy dinner order

Read the rest of this entry »

I often come across money keywords, you know those terms that have good traffic and decent profit margins.  Sometimes they just don’t generate the money they should be.  It’s not because of me, it’s because the user is stupid.  You heard me right.  My mom always told me not to call people stupid, but sometimes some people are just stupid.

I think users are stupid when they search for something that they don’t want.  This is not to say they don’t wany anything, they just are searching with the wrong words.  For example I found that people searching for health insurance rarely wanted health insurance.  Personal health insurance is very expensive and generally limited on what it covers.  However if you showed them a health savings plan, your conversions will go through the roof because that is what they really wanted. Read the rest of this entry »

Kellie Stevens of AffiliateFairPlay will join me on GoodKarma to talk about adware. She’ll help explain the world of adware, who benefits, who loses and how to deal with it.  Some people may think it only impacts affiliates but as you’ll learn it also touches consumers and merchants.  Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure you have or very soon will have someone tell you that you should use their services because they are ranking #1 for a term that has millions of competing sites.  For example let’s say they rank #1 for personalized color:

WOW! They rank #1 for a keyword that has over 11 million competiting sites!  Not exactly. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then I come across people wondering why their network of sites is having problems.  They think they built it correctly and yet something went wrong.  Here are the key issues I would pay attention to if I were to build a network of sites.

Domains - Use different registrars, on different dates with different whois information and register the domains for varied time lengths.  This will randomize it but it also does create problems since false whois information can cause you to lose a domain.  The alternative is to use the private registration services.  But that will look weird if you have 100 sites all using private domain registration. 

Hosting - Forget about different IP addresses.  You need to use different vendors.  It is easy to compare the IP ownership and see that it is all hosted at one company.

Templates - Do not use the same look and feel.  It is easy to find sites by searching for identical footers or copyright notices.  You need to pay attention to the small stuff and make sure it is all different.

Toolbars - Most toolbars today are tracking your internet activity.  If you have a toolbar installed and you regularly visit your secret network of sites, your repetitive traffic could show these sites are related.

Links - If you interlink these sites it is especially easy to uncover that.  You need to randomize the links.  Also if the only inbound links are from your network, it is easy to determine that as well.  You should add some “noise” to the network and add easy links from outside sources like blog links, reciprocal links, etc.  Also outbound links are another easy item to investigate.  Make sure to add “noise” to the outbounds links as well.  And I think it goes without saying to randomize the anchor text a bit.

Congratulations to Darren Kay, Jim Hathaway and Liana Evans.  They are the happy winners of the GoodKarma WebmasterWorld Pubcon Pass Giveaway for the upcoming conference in Las Vegas. 

 Thank you to everybody you entered and better luck next time.  See you in Vegas!