I have been conducting a test on the relative performance of Google ad sense text and link units versus that of adsense image units. The test has been conducted over a number of months and involves 100,000 page impressions so that it is statistically significant.

Whilst Google’s terms of service prevent the disclosure of precise click through rates it appears that the comparative performance assessments are allowed.

The ads linked unit and the text unit had very similar performance levels, both these units were positioned on the left-hand side of the page.

The image unit was positioned on the right-hand sidebar near the bottom of the page and as such, would have been expected to perform worse than the other units. Notwithstanding this it actually had a click through rate one fifth of that of the other units and carried advertisers with a lower click cost.

Google publish heat maps of pages showing the best place to position your ad units, these results are consistent with this thought the very poor performance of image units is surprising. Needless to say my first action now is to substitute on any image units I am promoting with a suitable text unit.

The experiment was interesting that, given that it has highlighted a loss of income, I am not going to delay by continuing it any further.

Squidoo participation can bring great benefits for very little outlay have you claimed your opportunity yet?

For those that do not know Squidoo is a communal website which allows you to

• develop your own web page on any topic
• incorporate affiliate and Ebay / Amazon links
• keep the profits or share them with a Squidoo charity

Perhaps the greatest opportunity flows from the excellent search engine rankings enjoyed by the Squidoo site and some of the main pages. Whilst Page Rank is not everything, the home page of the Squidoo site is a PR6. Where else can you put your own web pages into a PR6 site?

Many fast moving Internet Marketers have been claiming their land in the web real estate rush. The land grab is really a url grab … as the pages you develop are on the Squidoo main domain and hence a page url can only be used once and will have one ‘owner’.

Some examples we have seen of developing Squidoo lenses as they are termed are: -

1. A lens focusing on boilers and explaining the different types of boiler available, combi boilers, regular and system types and links to the best selling boilers currently

2. A full coverage of the British Gas Homecare product range covering boiler maintenance and repair, central heating system maintenance, plumbing, drains and electrical care.

If you have any aspirations to become an Internet Marketer you need to develop your online real estate and Squidoo is a free first step you should consider. The site is easy to use and has guides to help the first timer together with a friendly, growing community.

MSN Adcenter advertisers have been advised that an editorial audit may be carried out on their campaigns following a change to their editorial audit rules of 15 January.

The email contains the following advice: - Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo Search Marketing has lowered its starting minimum bid to £0.05 for its pay per click programme and has written to advertisers in the UK this week to advise them.

This sounds as though it is a benefit and should encourage greater ppc activity in the Yahoo system but I wonder if that is correct. Will minimum bid reductions be a benefit to existing advertisers?

Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to being a good blogging platform Wordpress can be used to store information that you may want to retrieve when away from your normal location but which you wish to prevent others from seeing.

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I am never surprised when brilliant, technical people make IT solutions complex.  In the years I spent running a business the main challenge was to translate the IT peoples clever initiatives into practical business solutions.

The area I am thinking of now relates to linux live cds.

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I have seen many posts on the Internet asking whether the Linksys usb wusb11v4 can be used in Slax Linux to provide wireless network access.  The Linksys wusb11v4 is a low cost wireless usb device.

The answer is yes, as that is what I am using to post this article.  How to do it ….  read on below.

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I have recently been experiencing referrer errors in my Tradedoubler reports and wondered what they were and the impact.

Searching the web resulted in a number of postings advising that, following advice from Tradedoubler support, the errors did not impact your commission and did not relate to subdomains.

Well surprise, surprise they are not correct.

Once I explicitly registered the subdomains in the system the errors were seen no more.  To be clear my affiliate site domain name was registered and it also housed several subdomains to house landing pages.  Visits to the subdomain landing pages were not being properly registered in the system until I explicitly registered the domains with Tradedoubler.

Also think about it - the reports do not track the clicks from non registered subdomains so how can the system keep track of sales from these items.

I do not feel comfortable with “do not worry” statements and recommend you remove all the sources of errors in your reports.  Tracking Affiliate commissions is not a science and can get tripped up by customers blocking cookies, using old browsers etc so cut your risks and attend to the source of your referrer errors.

The recent big daddy Google update could have a consequence for Google that the search team had not foreseen as I discuss below.

One major change in emphasis in the Google algorithms is the focus on inboulnd links, IBLs.  A site will not be fully indexed or crawled unless it has an acceptable number of topic relevant IBLs.

Reflecting on the impact of the recent implementation you have to wonder whether the Google team have fully considered the long term impact of the changes they have introduced.

The increased emphasis on IBL’s to get indexed must create a barrier to new sites getting indexed and hence this reduces their visibility for a considerable period of time. Lack of visibility will impact their ability to naturally acquire IBL’s and enter the search engine index.

Does this mean that over a number of months Google’s index will become stale with fewer new entrants, with little new content other than that flowing from the established sites in the index, will it become a club for established sites?

If it does then it becomes a closed shop with closed ears to new sites that can often bring radical new content into the index,  content that is very interesting to the people who search for information.

Secondly for those sites currently in the index ….. are their IBL’s being impacted by sites with few IBL’s dropping out? As sites drop out do their outbound links cease to count and hence do some other sites loose IBL’s as a consequence?

If this is true, each iteration of the process sees established sites loose IBL’s and some will ultimately fall below the IBL volume criteria and they drop out of the index.  This will create a nervous set of web masters with only sites like BBC or CNN immune from this impact.

For these reasons I do not consider that the recent changes can be sustainable in the long term and Google must have a rethink, or we will learn that this was a stopgap change to address some short term problems with a more considered set of changes to come.

If it is not a stopgap measure we will reflect on this moment, a time when a new giant and icon of the new Internet age tripped itself up, became middle aged and gradually sunk into decline whilst its senior executives spend their share option monies.

I raised this question in Matt Cutts blog but he is on holiday and has not responded. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/#comment-32926

The structure of a site can impact on the pagerank of individual pages and this article tries to illustrate the concepts behind this and the importance of Link Popularity.

Pagerank was defined in the original Google article as

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))  where d is a dampening factor commonly believed to be 0.85.

So pagerank of page A is 0.15 plus a little bit of the pagerank of each page that links to it ( this share relates to the pagerank of the linking page divided by the number of outbound links on the page).

Thinking of this it can be seen that:-

• adding pages increases the total potential pagerank of a site
• inbound links increase the total pagerank within a site
• pagerank can be distributed around the site by changing the linking structure to funnel it to important pages
• poor linking structures can prevent a site achieving its maximum potential aggregated pagerank as some links are not established
• the allocation of pagerank can leak out of a site when it links outwards (unless using the rel=nofollow tag )

Accordingly it is important to consider the structure of a site and ensure that pagerank is shepherded to the important pages in the site.  In this way they will have higher pagerank and a better ranking in the search engine index.

Some other points to note are

• Pagerank goes from 1 to 10
• the increase is probably logarithmic
• pages with no links to them are classed as orphans by Google and excluded from the pagerank calculations which are iterative

There is an excellent, but complicated, article on this at http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html