This Site Wouldn’t Harm A Flea…
Looks like Google’s flagged this site as harboring malware, for some reason. If you do a site:memwg.com search on Google you’ll see what I mean. All my pages are being shown in the SERPS with the warning “This site may harm your computer”. Let me assure you that there’s nothing bad on this site that I know of. It’s just a blog. I do distribute some software that I’ve written, but that stuff’s malware free. The only thing I can guess is that someone has either compromised the site somehow or else the site’s been flagged incorrectly. Unfortunately, there’s no way to determine what exactly is tripping up Google’s filters. I’ve submitted a review request to rectify the situation, maybe they’ll give me an idea of what’s wrong. In the meantime, if you have any ideas, I’m all ears…
Back In The Saddle
I’m back! It took me a good week to recover from that allergic reaction, but I’m off most of the drugs now. Still feeling a bit weak from my experience, but overall things are OK. The next big project is to finish my income taxes, which are due in a couple of days 
If you’ve sent me mail, please be patient, it’ll take a while to go through the overflowing inbox. The good news is that I had some time to think about what I want to do next with this blog and a nice little project came to mind — stay tuned!
Allergic Reactions
If you were wondering why I dropped off the face of the earth suddenly, it’s because last Friday I had an allergic reaction to something I ingested either that day or the day before. It was a major reaction that entailed three visits to the hospital and intravenous medication. Luckily, it wasn’t a fatal reaction, but the next one could be. Meanwhile, I’m at home doped up on Benadryl and steroids wondering when this incredibly itchy all-over rash will go away… I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
Anyhow, things here will be quiet for a few more days, I think. If you’ve sent me mail over the last few days, please be patient, it will take me a while to answer things…
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Need A Tool?
I’m looking for some ideas for useful (or semi-useful) free online tools I could write as a way to garner some link love for this blog. Actually, I have several ideas in mind but who knows if anyone else would find them useful. So I thought I’d just ask my readers what they’d like to see and do a bit of market research that way…
Here’s the deal. Leave a comment telling me about an online tool you’d like to see developed. Could be anything, but it has to be something I can offer for free (or at least a free version). It can be a tool I place on one of my sites, a script I give away, a WordPress plugin, etc. The incentive? If I build the tool, I’ll give you a link back to a site of your choosing as your reward.
I have no idea if anyone will participate in this, but I hope a few (or many!) of you do…
6300 Copies of MEMWG Sold!
Speaking of AdSense books, today I coincidentally received a copy of the latest royalty report for Make Easy Money With Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program, the book that was the genesis for this blog. As of December 31, 2007, just over 6300 copies of MEMWG have been sold. This includes several hundred copies of Gagnez facilement de l’argent avec Google et AdSense, the French translation of the book. (No, I didn’t do the translation!)
6300 copies may sound like a lot, but it’s not. The book was published in 2005, after all, so it’s hardly a bestseller. I haven’t even earned out the advance yet, although it’s coming close now. But as I’ve stated before in The Uneconomics of Book Publishing, there’s so much work involved in writing a conventionally-published book for the money you get that I doubt I’ll write another one without first having ensured that it would be a bestseller.
Money aside, though, it’s nice to hear from the readers who enjoyed the book and learned from it. I’m still surprised it sells, to be honest, but the material still stands the test of time even if the screenshots are now wrong.
Feel free to pick up a copy to use as a gift. Or a doorstop 
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Joel Comm Releases AdSense Secrets 4.0
It’s been a while since AdSense publishers have heard from Joel Comm, but today Joel has released AdSense Secrets 4.0, the latest version of his bestselling AdSense ebook. I’m downloading it right now as I write this. It’s big — over 200 pages. I’ll post a detailed review later.
The new version costs only $9.95, which is a big price drop from the previous versions. However, some caveats:
- You can only purchase by credit card. (No PayPal.)
- You will be presented with some upsells. (Well, what did you expect?)
- You will be given a 1-month trial subscription to his new Internet marketing newsletter, “The Top 1% Report”. You’ll receive it in the mail (along with a bonus CD, apparently) within a few weeks of your purchase. (Hopefully less than 4!) The trial subscription will continue as a paid $29.95/month subscription unless you cancel.
So let’s call a spade a spade: this release of AdSense Secrets is really just a way to get people to subscribe to his new physical newsletter. I really dislike the negative billing option. Now I have to remind myself to cancel the subscription in a month. Be happy I took one for the team!
I’m sure the book is good. Too bad you can’t just buy it without the report.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
AdSense and Porn
AdSense publishers cannot use AdSense on adult-oriented sites. This has been a long-standing policy of Google’s. To quote the relevant part of the AdSense program policies:
Sites displaying Google ads may not include … pornography, adult, or mature content
In most cases it’s easy enough for publishers to know what qualifies as adult content and to refrain from showing ads in those situations. But what if you’re dealing with user-generated content?
User-generated content — comments, postings, searches, ratings, etc. — is a great way to get traffic and links, but it can also open up Pandora’s box. Because people talk about sex. They search for sex (literally and figuratively). They tell dirty jokes. They post nude pictures. They do all kinds of naughty things, things that might not be kosher with the AdSense program policies.
So what do you do about it?
The first step is to make sure that all the non-user-generated content on the site abides by the program policies. That shouldn’t be a problem.
The second step is to determine whether or not adult/mature user-generated content should be allowed on your site at all. For some sites it’s a no-brainer — family-oriented sites being a prime example. If you don’t want adult content, make sure your terms of service state that fact and put some mechanisms in place to moderate the content. (If you’re building communities, you’ll be surprised at how well the community itself can police its own members in this regard — that may be all that’s needed.)
Assuming you’re OK with adult content, the third step is to deal with it appropriately. You could, for example, create “adult-only” areas of a site where such content is acceptable. Or have a way for users to flag/vote on objectionable content and let visitors set their own “filtering levels”. Squidoo has this feature, for example.
But what do you do in place of AdSense if you have adult content? Because AdSense ads will not be displayed on adult-oriented pages once Google determines what’s on those pages. The alternatives aren’t hard to figure out:
- Don’t display anything at all.
- Join an adult ad network.
You’d be surprised at the number of affiliate programs available for adult material! Let’s face it, if big Web 2.0 players like Squidoo and StumbleUpon benefit from porn, there’s nothing that says you can’t, either. Unless you think all pornography is evil, of course.
But we’re not here to debate the pros and cons of pornography, just to discuss what to do about adult content on your AdSense sites. The safest approach is to avoid it altogether. If you can’t, or won’t, then try to segregate it. Then decide if you want to monetize it.
Yahoo Publishers Get It In The Rear
Lots of news today about how Yahoo’s going to be testing the use of Google’s AdSense program for the ads it displays in search results. My first thought was that YPN publishers wouldn’t be too happy about this, would they? It’s an admission from Yahoo that their own text advertising program just isn’t good enough to compete against AdSense — something that isn’t really a surprise to most AdSense publishers, but if you’re a YPN fan this must hurt.
Reciprocal Linking gnikniL lacorpiceR
Any AdSense publisher who depends on organic search engine traffic is naturally very interested in their search engine results page (SERP) rankings. It’s not unusual (and it’s good practice) to monitor the rankings for key search phrases, especially for those lucky times when you’re in the top 10 results one one or more of the search engines. Anyone who’s been there can tell you there’s a drastic difference in the amount of traffic a #1 ranking gets versus a #10 ranking — you want to go as high as you can to maximize that traffic flow.
For competitive search terms, links to your site have a lot to do with those rankings. Obviously, on-page SEO (good title, use of headings, keywords sprinkled in text) plays an important part, as does the internal linking structure of the site (which are really the only links you can truly control, so you should use them to full effect), but ultimately it’s the links from external sites that are going to boost you up to the top. Getting those links isn’t always easy, but there’s a time-honored method that sometimes makes a lot of sense if you do it right: reciprocal linking.
You Scratch My Back And I’ll Scratch Yours
Reciprocal linking (sometimes misspelled as reciprical linking) occurs when two websites agree to link to each other in order to exchange traffic and/or increase search engine rankings. Back in the old days when pages got ranked almost literally based on how many links they had, reciprocal linking was de rigueur, because it was an easy way to get lots of links. Both sites benefited, so there was really no reason not to do it.
Search engines soon wised up to the fact the reciprocal linking was artificially boosting rankings for sites that really didn’t deserve high rankings, so they started discounting such links in their calculations. The reasoning, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it, is that non-reciprocal links (sometimes called one-way links, although of course all links are one-way) are more authoritative — the fact that you link to a site without requiring that site to link back to your site must mean that you really like that other site.
So reciprocal links now have a lot less worth than non-reciprocal links, especially if the links are between pages that don’t have a common theme.
So Scratch My Other Back
Of course, it didn’t take people long to realize what was happening and look for other ways to benefit from reciprocal linking without making it look like reciprocol linking. Thus the three-way link was born. A three-way link is a set of three links that are spread across three sites. Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A. Technically, there are no reciprocal links… but there is a path to and from any site. And there’s nothing that says it has to be three sites: you can do a cycle with four sites, five sites, six sites, and so on.
Can’t find anyone to link to in such a cycle? No problem, there are companies out there that will do it for you automatically and charge you a monthly fee for the privilege.
Are Reciprocal Links Worthless?
There’s a belief that reciprocal links are worthless. They’re not completely worthless. You can still get traffic from them (traffic and rankings are separate things). And you still get a small boost from all those links.
The best use of reciprocal links, though, has to be a technique called link laundering, which I suggest you read about. If you’d like to implement something similar, use a subdomain and install the free LinkEX script. Take some topically-related PLR you have sitting on your disk (c’mon, we all have some!) and create a site from it on that subdomain. Just a couple of pages will do, plus a link exchange directory. Insert a couple of links with good anchor text in the content. Then gather some links to the subdomain via the link exchange script. Then you’re laundering links using simple reciprocal linking.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
Link to me…. pretty please?
My last post was an April Fool’s joke, of course (though not nearly as good as Google allows publishers to click ads, IMHO), but now time for something more serious. Readers, I need your help!
This blog contains nearly 1000 posts, almost all of which are in Google’s index, which is great… but hardly any of the rank well, even for their exact titles. It’s come to the point where I’m wondering if there’s a penalty attached to memwg.com. The site’s undergone two major upheavals: the first when I had to switch away from makeeasymoneywithgoogle.com (the original site) because Google stopped serving AdSense ads to it (because it had “google” in its name), the second when I moved from blojsom to WordPress and all the page URLs changed (though I handled most of them gracefully with proper 301 redirects). I know there’s something wrong with the site because a couple of months ago I got a warning in my Google Webmasters console that the site was marked in the index as being one that could cause harm to a visitor’s computer, i.e. it had spyware, although nothing of the sort has ever happened, of course. I think that’s been resolved, but what with that and the previous changes I really think the site’s not doing as well in the SERPs as it should be.
The point of all this: when I mentioned to my wife that I’d be doing an April Fool’s post, she wondered why I was bothering, I should be spending my time on the other, money-making sites in my network. Or on selling more software. And maybe she’s right.
Like many blogs, this one’s a labor of love. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care about its rankings. An improvement in the SERPs would be great, so I need to overcome whatever penalty the memwg.com has slapped on it. I can plead with Google to remove it, but who knows what they’ll do. The best thing would be to get more links to the site.
So here’s my request: if you like this blog, please link to it. Ideally, find your favorite post (see the sitemap for the complete list) and link directly to it with some good anchor text (the title of the post is usually a good choice). Or just link straight to memwg.com with anchor text like The Unofficial AdSense blog or My favorite AdSense blog or even just AdSense — some variant involving “AdSense”. The more links I get, the easier it will be for me to outrank all the sites that do nothing but copy my content without my permission!
It’s seems silly to ask for links, but I think many of you don’t link to many other sites in the first place. So I’m making this selfish request. If my posts (or my software) has benefited you, a link back would be greatly appreciated.
And if you’re a StumbleUpon user, I’d also appreciate a stumble: 
Stumble it!
And, of course, feel free to bookmark the pages you like. The more, the merrier!
OK, that’s all. I hope I’m not out of line requesting these things, but sometimes bystanders need a little push!
Eric
The New AdSense Paid Links Program
This week Google is going to announce a number of new initiatives: AdSense For SEO, the “paid” extension to “nofollow”, and the Goggle adult web search program. Watch for official announcements on Inside AdSense and Matt Cutts’ blog, but here are some early details about the initiatives.
AdSense For SEO
AdSense For SEO is a new AdSense program that existing AdSense publishers can opt into. It’s a paid links program designed specifically for search engine optimization purposes. Unlike normal AdSense text ads, ads shown in the AdSense for SEO program will be normal links (marked with the new “paid” attribute — see below) embedded directly into the web page. The standard AdSense <iframe> is skipped entirely, making it possible for AdSense For SEO links to pass PageRank to the linked sites.
Instead of getting paid per click, AdSense publishers who participate in AdSense For SEO will get paid on a per-impression basis, similar to the way they’re paid for image ads in the AdSense For Content program. Payouts will vary but will be based in part on the page’s PageRank. AdWords advertisers will have the option of targeting specific sites or targeting sites by PageRank and/or topic. They will of course continue to bid against each other in order to be shown on the desired sites.
“Paid” and “Adult” NoFollow Variants
In conjunction with AdSense For SEO, Google will be announcing an extension of the “nofollow” system used by all the major search engines. To recap, a “nofollow” link is a link that isn’t as trustworthy as normal (”follow”) links. You create it like this:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://konsiz.com">click here</a>
It’s a way of linking to an external site without “voting” for the site — search engines treat those links more cautiously. (Some people refer to “nofollow” as a link condom, but that analogy is imperfect. “Nofollow” is really more like the cowbells that lepers had to wear in the old days: a warning that something is amiss, not protection against it.)
Previously, Google required sites to use “nofollow” to mark paid links. Now, however, paid links will be marked with the new “paid” attribute:
<a rel="paid" href="http://pet-fence.ericgiguere.com">Invisible Fence</a>
You can combine “nofollow” and “paid” to denote paid links to dubious sites. Which brings us to the last initiative.
Goggle Adult Search Network
With advertising revenues down, Google is finally turning its eye to the adult content arena. Since the Google search network already contains a lot of adult material, they’ve decided to create a custom search engine dedicated to adult content. That search engine will be available through the Goggle.com domain. AdWords advertisers will be able to bid on search ad placement in Goggle results separately from those in the regular search results.
As well, Google is expanding “nofollow” to include a new “adult” attribute. This attribute will denote links to adult material, which will make it easier for Google to decide what sites to include in the Goggle searches. Adult webmasters are encouraged to mark their adult links in this way as soon as possible. The “adult” attribute can be combined with “paid” and “nofollow” as appropriate, or it can be used on its own.
I’ll post more details on all these initiatives later.
Sponsored Link: PLRSiteBuilder is an easy way to create and maintain content-rich websites written by yours truly. Try it today!
Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.