New Features Highlights for Google Reader, AdSense & Search
September 14, 2007 by Gaman · 9 Comments
I’ve been busy for the past few days planning and negotiating with the contractor on my parents’ house extension, which is probably evident from the patchy posting frequency you might have noticed for a couple of days.
Anyway, I’ll continue to update this blog as time permits.
I’d like to mention a few new features that have been added into several of Google’s applications these past few days.
Google Reader Search
If you are using Google Reader as your feed reader, you’ll be happy to know that they’ve just added search. This feature is one the main features I’ll look for in any feed reader.
Basically, you can search your feed right from the Google Reader interface. So, let’s say you recalled that I once wrote a tutorial about AdSense blend strategy. Without going to Sabahan.com, just enter the keyword into the search box and you’ll get what you are looking for.
8 Things to Do When Your Site Is Removed From Google
August 21, 2007 by Gaman · 10 Comments
If you depend on Google for 90% of your website traffic, the consequences of losing that traffic when your site is removed from Google can be devastating.
It’s even more so if you are making a living working on the Internet. All the long hours you had put in seems meaningless. Watching your cash flow dries up can be a real blow to your motivation, I know, I’ve been there.
But before we go insane over the whole debacle, take a deep breath and calm down. There will always be an explanation as to why your pages disappear from Google.
The good news is, having your site removed from Google isn’t a death sentence because you can always request for re-inclusion. If you know why your pages disappear, you should be able make the necessary changes and have them re-indexed as soon as possible.
“Banned” By Google? Find Out How to Entice Googlebot to Recrawl Your Site
August 18, 2007 by Gaman · 20 Comments
In my previous post I wrote about a problem I had where many of my sites were suddenly removed from Google search result pages.
It was ‘unsettling’ to say the least because I could had easily lost hundreds of dollars per day from AdSense and affiliate programs that depend on Google organic traffic during that debacle.
I found it strange to see Googlebot repeatedly spewed the robots.txt unreachable error or Network unreachable errors via my Google Webmaster Console when I was absolutely sure that my server uptime had been nothing but one hundred percent during the period.
If you are not familiar with the robots.txt, it’s a file used to keep web pages from being indexed by search engines.
A few questions came to mind when it happened to me.
10 Handy Tricks to Search Google Like An Expert
July 20, 2007 by Gaman · 5 Comments
If you are reading this, chances are, you are probably a fan of Google search. However, unless you are a tech geek, your typical search activity would probably involve entering a few words and changing them until you find what you are looking for.
While Google is getting better at finding the right information for you, there are a couple of tricks you could use to make your search more effective.
The following are 10 simple tricks that I’ve found useful in helping me find the right information quickly.
- Display Current Local Time Anywhere
To find the local time of a major city anywhere in the world, enter “time in city name ”Example: “time in kuala lumpur”
This is particularly useful when your website is targeted towards users from a different time zone. Use this query to check the time in any city to ensure that the important information on your site is published at an appropriate hour.
10 Tips to Help You Make Money With Google Referral 2.0
July 6, 2007 by Gaman · 22 Comments
Now that Google has made their Referral program available to everyone, I’d like to share a few tips to help you make more money from it.
While making money from Google referral isn’t much different from making money from other pay per lead/pay per action affiliate programs, certain restrictions apply when it comes to recommending Google’s referral products to your users.
Things You Should Know When Promoting Google Referral 2.0
Google AdSense Help states that you are allowed to endorse or recommend the products you’re referring on your site. However, AdSense program policies don’t permit you to encourage clicks or draw ‘unnatural” attention to the referral units you’re displaying on your site. So you are not allowed to use language such as “Click here”, “Visit these links to support our site”.
Google AdSense Referrals 2.0 Review
July 6, 2007 by Gaman · 3 Comments
As you may know, Google has rolled out AdSense Referrals 2.0 program for the international AdSense publishers recently.
This main different between this and their “normal” AdSense program is that, you only get paid when your visitor click on the ad AND perform certain action.
This is also known as pay per action or pay per lead. In this case you get paid when your user completes an online lead form, make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, download a trial software and so on.
The good thing about Google Referral program is that you can select offers available in specific countries, reducing the chance of sending unqualified lead to the merchants. For example, if your website is targeted towards the American audience, you can choose to display offers valid in the US only.
FeedBurner Pro Is Now Free
Here’s another reason to love Google. Following their acquisition of Feedburner, Google has made two of their paid service free for everyone.
One of the services is FeedBurner Stats Pro. This is a feed analytics tool that gives you a more details look at your readers such as the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content.
To turn this on, log into your account and go to the Analyze tab anc click on the FeedBurner Stats PRO link under services. Then click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.
MyBrand is another service which is now free for everyone. It allows you to match you feed address to your domain name. So instead of using feeds.feedburner.com/sabahancom, I can now use feeds.sabahan.com/feed
Google Quick Links: 28 Jun 2007
June 28, 2007 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
Life at Google – The Microsoftie Perspective
An anonymous blogger posted an alleged email circulating on Microsoft-internal mailing lists. The post compares the working culture between Google and Microsoft. Recently, Google was voted as the best company to work with in the US according to the Fortune magazine and the writer probably didn’t like to the sounds of that. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet tracked down what looks to be the author of the email.
Inside the Google Pay Per Action Beta
Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille interviewed Rob Kniaz, Google’s Product Manager about Google Pay Per Action beta, ad formats, and whether Google considers AdWords and AdSense to be affiliate marketing.
Google Power Searcher Tip to Help You Find Fresher Documents
June 22, 2007 by Gaman · 4 Comments
Do you know that you can ask Google to only show newly updated results by specifying the date option when performing a search?
By newly updated results, I mean those pages that were recently fetched by Google and included into their index.
Google estimated the age of a URL as the last time they fetched the page. However, the URLs returned on the search result don’t always represent the recent ones due to Google’s ranking algorithm.
If you want to see documents that have been updated, say the last three months, you can do so my specifying the Date option in Google’s Advance Search.
Here’s an example. A normal search for sabahan returns the following results.
If you want more recent results, you can restrict the search to the last three months.
eBay Spent $26 Million Monthly on Google AdWords
June 20, 2007 by Gaman · 6 Comments
Last week eBay pulled all their campaigns from Google AdWords to protest a party planned by Google to promote Google Checkout that was coincide with the eBay Live event in Boston.
The eBay’s event was overshadowed by Google planned to promote Google Checkout to eBay sellers who used PayPal.
Google said eBay has been refusing to offer Google Checkout as a payment option for sellers and buyers on eBay even after Google had been approached by power sellers to obtain access to Checkout.
When I read the story I wondered how much cash Google lost after eBay pulled their ads.
Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land has written an interesting post of how much traffic eBay received from Google and Google cash lost.
Without citing a source, Did-it’s Mark Simon says in this MediaPost piece that eBay spends — or used to spend — $26 million monthly on Google AdWords in the U.S. market. If true that’s $312 million annually.
