Someone asked me a question about the so-called “blog and ping” model and what it meant. The idea is quite simple: to get search engines to find your content, you must blog about it and then ping the search engines.

Blog and ping sounds innocent enough, but notice how I've phrased it: “you must blog about it“. Unlike regular blogs, where the blog is the content, the blog and ping model promotes non-blog or stolen content. The typical “blog and ping” blog has postings that do nothing but link to other pages (using keyword-rich links, of course) or that steal their content from other (legitimate) blogs. What's more, the postings are almost always automated, with scripts running at regular intervals to start new blog and ping cycles.

The point of blog and ping is to get pages to rank highly in the search engines and to make money off those pages using advertising (like AdSense ads) or affiliate links. The blog and ping model works (though not as well as it did before — the search engines are getting better at catching it) because the search engines index blog content very quickly. You'll notice, for example, that the search engines have separate submission methods for blog feeds. Blog and ping takes advantage of this speed.

You can learn more about blog and ping by reading Understanding Blog and Ping from The Blog Herald.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

If you've been an AdSense publisher for a while, you've surely encountered people who complain about being kicked out of the AdSense program for no good reason. While I'm sure there are cases where the publisher was unfairly terminated, I suspect most account terminations are in fact done for valid reasons.

It's your job as an AdSense publisher to keep your nose clean. Keeping your nose clean means:

• If you notice suspicious clicks, report it.
• If you accidentally click your own ads (it happens), report it.
• If your site is suddenly featured on Slashdot, Digg, or some other high-traffic site, report it.
• If you know something (press release, review, etc.) is going to send a lot of traffic your way, report it.
• If you're in doubt about anything, report it.

As far as I can tell, Google takes the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in its dealings with publishers unless you show a pattern of co-operative behavior. Not waiting until Google notices something — hmm, those earnings are way above normal, I think I'll just let it slide… — greatly increases your chances of not getting your account suspended or terminated.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

Sorry, this isn't directly related to AdSense, but it's something that's been bugging me. I'm a member of ListDotCom, which is an opt-in service for Internet marketers (hard to believe I can call myself a “marketer”) looking to build their mailing lists. So every day I get a few emails with various deals, etc. Some aren't bad, but there are definitely a lot of iffy/scammy ones. I find the ones offering to show me how to become an AdSense expert particularly amusing, of course

Anyhow, somebody was promoting Automatic Money Vault, which appears to be a system showing you how to make money by promoting ClickBank products. (I haven't read it, but I bet I can describe the system for you: 1. Join ClickBank; 2. Buy a product; 3. Create an autoresponder sequence promoting said product; 4. Go back to Step 1.) I have no problems with the product, but it reminds me of why I don't like most of the sales pages I encounter and why I had so much trouble coming up with a decent sales page for my niche discovery course.

Here's the part of the sales page I really dislike:

Turn off the browser's JavaScript support and this is what you see:

Whoops, where did the date of the special offer go?

The answer, of course, is that the date is conveniently generated by a bit of JavaScript so that the page always shows the current date. Which implies that the special offer is about to end today, so hurry up and order it already… ick. I just don't like it.

But these tricks work, otherwise they wouldn't be used so much. It makes it hard for those of us who want to push our own quality products without resorting to such tactics.

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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.