Google Lets Advertisers Combine Keyword and Placement Targeting
AdSense publishers are part of what Google calls its “Content Network”. AdWords advertisers can choose to place ads on the content network, but previously they had to choose between keyword-targeted ads — ads triggered based on the content of a page — or placement-targeted ads — ads triggered based on the domain/URL of a page.
Google is now letting advertisers combine both types of targeting. This lets you effectively target specific pages of a large, multi-topic site by keyword instead of having to list off all the URLs on that site that match your criteria.
It’s a nice feature for advertisers and will make the content network more appealing, which is good for us.
Copyright and Derivative Works
So yesterday’s situation serves as a good refresher on the concept of a “derivative work”. In the United States, federal copyright law defines a derivative work as follows:
A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications, which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.
The law goes on to say this in Section 106:
… the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights … to prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work
This is US law, of course, and not all countries have such an explicit definition. Canada currently does not, for example, though the copyright legislation does list similar rights as examples of what the copyright owner can do.
The point here is to be very careful when creating something based on someone else’s work. As I discussed before in my Private Label Rights Pitfalls article, just because something is labelled as “PLR” doesn’t necessarily mean that it is PLR.
The easiest way to avoid copyright problems is to write everything yourself from scratch. Use other material as research, sure, but make sure you’re not just rewriting someone else’s content so that it falls under the “derivative work” rule… As ad AdSense publisher, you’ll probably find that you have better results from natural organic search traffic with completely original content anyhow.
Tags: AdSense, copyright, derivative works
A Nemesis Tale
Do me a favor and read my review of Google Nemesis. Then read this other one and tell me what you think.
What’s that saying about flattery again?
Update: I’ve decided to give Bjorn the benefit of the doubt on this one, especially now that he’s linked back to my review as a reference for his own.
Tags: AdSense, Google, Google Nemesis, review
How To Get A ClickBank Refund
There’s a lot of crap for sale on ClickBank. There are also some good things available. Personally, as a software/ebook seller I like to use ClickBank because they handle all the tax collection issues (this is going to become a big issue for people selling things directly via PayPal in the next few years, trust me) and they pay regularly and consistently.
But I also like to use ClickBank as an individual buyer because they make it easy to get a refund. So if something I buy isn’t up to snuff for whatever reason (see my recent Google Nemesis review) I can get a full refund within 8 weeks of the purchase, no questions asked.
There are two ways to get a refund. The simplest is to simply take the electronic receipt ClickBank mailed you after the purchase and forward it to refunds@clickbank.com along with a brief message asking for a refund and why you want the refund.
The second way is to go to the ClickBank purchase questions page and select the “I would like to request a refund” subject. You’ll have to fill in the purchase details (obtained from the aforementioned receipt) and give an explanation. (Since you need the receipt to do this, it’s just simpler to mail a copy off IMHO…)
In either case, you’ll get a refund within two or three business days. It’s really that simple.
BTW, refund requests shouldn’t be knee-jerk reactions. If you’re having a problem with the product, contact the vendor first and see if they can fix it. Refunds should be a last resort. Sellers get notified when refunds occur and can see the reason why a refund was requested… there’s nothing worse than getting a “the product never worked” reason when you could have fixed it easily enough if the buyer had contacted you first.
Out of all the ClickBank products I’ve purchased, I think I’ve only asked for refunds on two of them.
Watch the Free Traffic Secrets Videos
Somehow I found the time over the last few days to watch the three free traffic videos by John Reese. These videos were released to promote his Traffic Secrets 2.0 course, which is launching this week.
The videos are high-quality but very simple, mostly John talking to the camera… you can listen to them while doing something else. The first video discusses a traffic strategy called “results detection”, which is essentially figuring out what other people are doing to get traffic and then doing something similar using that research. He gives several examples of how to do this for search engine rankings, getting to the first page on Digg, etc.
The second video is all about “owning a larger piece of the Internet”, i.e. creating and distributing content. The “trick” here is to write lots of content in batches and let it trickle out slowly, using syndication to get it distributed far and wide. By doing it in batches you free up time to do other things, instead of being a slave to your daily blog posts…
The third video is about generating traffic by creating software: toolbars, WordPress plugins, online calculators, etc. Reese considers this to be an underused traffic generation method.
None of this is earth-shattering information, but it’s well presented and it might be a useful refresher. AdSense publishers will find the second video the most interesting, of course, since AdSense is all about content monetization.
Note that everything he talks about requires work. There are no magic bullets, which is a nice change from other books and courses I’ve seen. I can’t comment on how good the Traffic Secrets 2.0 course is, since I haven’t seen it, but if the videos reflect the quality of the information in the package then it’s probably decent value. The price tag’s high, but it’s delivered as a physical product (12 DVDs and various workbooks) and not just a series of downloads. (It’s much cheaper than the original course, BTW.)
Aside: Anyone know of any good WordPress plugins for easily editing old posts? I have to make some changes to this blog as part of my depenalization effort, but the thought of editing all those posts through the standard WordPress admin console is not a happy thought…
What Kind of Text Links Are Safe?
Yesterday I mentioned how I disabled text link ads on this site… a reader had a question that I thought deserved a proper answer in a separate post instead of as a comment. Here’s what was asked:
do you mean by that company text-link-ads [DOT… you know]?
Or do you mean something else? doesn’t google adsense itself provide text link ads? what about things like for CJ products/advertisers — is that also verboten now?
The text link ads I was referring to are essentially paid links that pass PageRank. Google doesn’t like paid links when those links are used to influence search engine results. Matt Cutts has discussed this for a long time:
What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, I would use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.
Essentially, Google wants you to either use “nofollow” on your paid links or use links that are generated dynamically when the page is loaded via JavaScript. (The latter kind of links don’t pass PageRank because the web crawlers don’t actually “see” them.) AdSense ads are done using the latter, for example.
The key is to avoid services that sell “dofollow” links. Google is penalizing sites that use such links.
Tags: AdSense, Google, links, PageRank, paid links
Google Depenalization - Steps 1 to 3
I’ve taken the first steps to getting Google to depenalize this blog. They were:
- Removed text link ads. I had some text link ads sprinked in a few places. It made me a bit of money, but not enough to offset the penalization IMHO. I’ve disabled the ads and removed this site from the ad marketplace entirely.
- Turned off comments on older posts. I installed the Comment Timeout plugin to disable commenting on posts older than 15 days. The plugin is pretty flexible, it lets you keep active posts open for longer as long as commenting is occurring.
- Went through and cleaned up ALL existing comments. This took a while, but I went through all the comments on this blog and removed the few spammy ones that had managed to squeak past both Akismet and me. BTW, I’ve concluded that Chuck Brown leaves the longest, densest, most insightful comments!
The next step is to run through the blog’s content and put “nofollow” on any disreputable and/or affiliate links. That will definitely take a while.
My goal with this is to not only restore the site’s natural search engine rankings but also to give contributors the proper PR boost they deserve, otherwise what’s the point of having a “dofollow” blog? Right now, though, I don’t think any PR is being passed to the other sites.
Recovering From a Google Penalty
If you have a site that’s penalized by Google (like this one — only the home page has PageRank) then you need to do your best to recover from that penalty. The most comprehensive advice on what to do is found on Google Penalty Advice for Webmasters. Someone’s story about how they reversed a penalty is also useful reading.
Note that penalties are easier to obtain when you have a “dofollow” blog — that’s one of the disadvantages.
I’ll document my journey here as well…
AdSense and Yahoo BOSS
Yahoo! has opened up its search technology to all comers via its BOSS service. I’ve looked over the BOSS licensing terms and the AdSense terms and conditions and it appears to me that it would be legal for now to display AdSense ads on pages that contain search results obtained via BOSS. At some point Yahoo! will supply its own ads (which more than likely will come from Google, ironically enough) and you’ll get a share of the revenue, but I think until then AdSense is a viable option for using BOSS.
If you think otherwise, please let me know why, I may have missed something somewhere in those documents.
Review: Google Nemesis
Today we’ll take a look at Google Nemesis and see what’s behind all the hype. This may very well be the first actual review you see!
Google Nemesis Contents
Google Nemesis is a monthly service that currently costs $67/month, with a $47/month upgrade also available. Essentially, it’s a hosted AdWords landing page and tracking service for ClickBank products. More on that shortly.
Besides the service, you also get:
- Two getting started videos that show you how to use the service.
- A free copy of Google Wealth Wizard in case you don’t know much about AdWords.
- Two reports: How To Spot The Shadow Elite (how to find winning AdWords campaigns that you can copy) and Creating the Perfect Review Page (self-explanatory).
If you upgrade your membership you also get to the “DJK Blueprints” special reports, presumably an ongoing monthly series. For July the two reports are Google Nemesis (not about the service, oddly enough, but an introduction to affiliate marketing with AdWords) and How to Effectively Split Test and Track Affiliate Offers with Google AdWords (using frames effectively to create your own landing pages on your own domains and still get a high quality score).
Oh, and you also get the “opportunity” to make money selling Google Nemesis as an affiliate.
The Service
If you buy Google Nemesis, you’re doing it for the service. As I mentioned above, it’s a service that lets you create AdWords landing pages to promote ClickBank products. It has some important limitations, though:
- It’s hosted on their own servers. My pages are being hosted on CBGuides.com, I know of at least three other sites being used to host pages but I don’t know if they’re hosting pages by other users of the service or if they’re private sites for the creators of the service and their buddies: AllCBReviews.com, CBRecommended.com and GSlasher.com. I can see them having to spread the people around different sites for scalability.
- It only works with ClickBank products. Forget any other affiliate program.
- You can only create product review landing pages. Right now, in fact, you can only create two-product and three-product review pages.
- The product review templates are fixed. There are only two of them so far: red and blue. Dunno if more are coming. You can fill in text only in certain spots. Editing is rather clumsy, too… you’re better off creating the text for your reviews in a text editor and pasting them into the right spots on the landing page.
Selecting the products to review is somewhat cumbersome. You have to use their built-in ClickBank search function… you can’t just type in the ClickBank vendor ID if you know it. It can be hard to find the product you want. Also, you can’t go back and change the products you’ve selected once the review page has been created.
Once you select the two or three products you want to compare (I’ll post a link to a sample in a separate page once I’m done the review) you have to fill in the text. You’re given a very simple page editor to use. You can type in standard HTML formatting commands like <b> but you can’t do too much else. There are images you can choose as well to make the page look more attractive, but you have a fairly limited library to choose from and no way to upload your own images.
Next to each review is a 4-element “star rating”, which you fill in with whatever criteria makes sense. The idea here is that you should give the first item reviewed a higher rating than the other two. Oddly enough, you have to manually choose your rating out of 10 (i.e. “9.7/10″) — the system doesn’t do it automatically based on the stars you select for each criterion.
Once you’re done with the landing page (you have to come up with all the text, which is really the hard part!) you get a URL to use in your AdWords ads. You then go and create some ads as usual… the service doesn’t help you out here at all, it’s strictly for creating landing pages.
After your ads are running, you can go back to the Google Nemesis dashboard and see stats about the page: where the visitors are coming from, which keywords they clicked on to get there, how many sales can be attributed to which keywords. Some of this data is done by integrating with your ClickBank account — it needs your login information to grab the data (you may want to create a separate ClickBank account to use with this service — there’s no limit on how many accounts you have, and why give the system access to all of your data?). You also get to see on average how long visitors are staying on your review page.
One problem you may face is the AdWords display URL limitation: for any given keyword, Google will only display one ad from a given URL. So if other people using Google Nemesis are bidding on the same keywords you are, your ads may not be displayed if your bids are too low — where they might be displayed (at a lower position) if they were on a separate URL.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I’m disappointed with Google Nemesis. I was expecting more from this service. It doesn’t save me any time in creating the landing pages. I can use Google Analytics to track visitors to the page. As long as I use ClickBank tracking IDs properly I can also easily figure out which keywords are converting into actual sales.
If you can’t do any of that, then it will help. But don’t think there’s no work involved — you still have to write compelling reviews that cause visitors to click through to the product sales pages. You still have to write compelling ads that potential buyers will click. You still have to select the right keywords to bid on. Expect to spend a lot of time doing all of these tasks.
It will be interesting to see how long the average membership lasts for this service.
Tags: AdSense, ClickBank, Day Job Killer, djknemesis, Google, Google Nemesis, Nemesis
How To Cancel A PayPal Subscription
Every time I want to cancel a PayPal subscription I end up scratching my head, because it’s not obvious where you go. Here are the steps you need to take:
- Login to your PayPal account.
- Click on the Profile link. Don’t choose any of the drop-down items, just click on “Profile” all by itself.
- Look under the Financial Information column and select the Pay List link.
- Click on the subscription you want to cancel.
- Click the Cancel link.
- Confirm the cancellation.
That’s all there is to it. Pretty simple once you know where to go. Don’t keep looking in vain for a “Subscriptions” link anywhere on the main page…
One other hint: if you want to switch funding sources for your PayPal account, add the new credit card before removing the old one. If you do it in the opposite order (remove, then add) you’ll end up implicitly cancelling all your subscriptions.
Tags: AdSense, cancellation, PayPal, subscription
Great WordPress SEO Tips
Joost de Valk’s WordPress SEO - The Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog is a “must read” for WordPress bloggers.
I’ve been having some serious indexing problems with this blog lately (less than half the pages are indexed, and most of those are in the supplemental index) and obviously I need to make some fixes.
As a side note, if you want to figure out how many pages of a site are in Google’s main index vs. in the supplemental index, this trick seems to work for now. The list the pages in the main index:
site:memwg.com/*
As you can see, this site has very few pages in the main index, despite the main page being PR 5 and some 56,000 backlinks if you believe Yahoo. This may be related to two things: my relative inactivity over the past month and several of my sites (blogs, mostly) being hacked into with links to bad neighborhoods. Although I’m not 100% certain as of yet what’s causing these issues.
Hopefully I can fix this… I’m sure some of you have gone through this before: any war stories to share?
Google Publishes Search Volume Data
Here’s something very useful to all of us: Google has finally released search volume numbers in the AdWords keyword tool. (You don’t have to join AdWords to use the tool, so everyone has access to the data.)
For example, I entered teacup and got this back for the first three entries:
| Term | June Search Volume | Average Search Volume |
| teacup | 550,000 | 673,000 |
| teacup puppies | 110,000 | 110,000 |
| teacup yorkie | 49,500 | 74,000 |
The data changes depending on what kind of search you’re interested in. For life insurance the current numbers are 2,740,000 for broad, 2,240,000 for phrase, and 201,000 for exact. (See here for explanations of broad/phrase/exact.)
Note that these numbers are derived from searches done both on Google and on the search network. It doesn’t include the content network (AdSense).
I’m sure all the keyword scrapers are super busy recoding their programs. Hmm…. I was looking for some cool tool ideas… 
Tags: AdSense, Google, keyword volume, keywords, search, search volume
Early Access To Google Nemesis
If anyone reading this blog is interested in buying Google Nemesis before the official launch time later today, just go here. I’ve used this kind of trick before to grab ClickBank items before they “officially” go on sale. Most ClickBank vendors have their products up early.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping a vendor from “leaking” the address of these early access pages… sounds like another topic for GeekAffiliate!
Tags: AdSense, affiliate, ClickBank, Google, Google Nemesis
July 4th Internet Slackers
Search Engine Roundtable asks AdSense publishers how their AdSense earnings fared over the US holiday weekend.
I can answer that quite easily: Mine sucked big time. Obviously I have too much of a dependence on the US crowd. I need to diversify my AdSense base geographically…
Darn the gorgeous weather we’ve been having! Bunch of slackers… get back to your computers!
Google Nemesis
Haven’t done a review of third-party stuff in a while, so today I thought I’d talk about Google Nemesis, which launches tomorrow. It’s another product from the guy behind Affiliate Project X and other entertaining infoproducts. I haven’t received an advance copy, so this isn’t technically a review, just some comments on what’s out there.
If you visit the Nemesis site, you’ll get to view a long video. I watched it early this morning, so it’s still fresh in my mind.
The first half of the video is devoted to showing you how great a ClickBank affiliate Chris is. Not much I can say here except that I wish my ClickBank cheques (oops, checks for the Americans) were even one tenth the size of his.
The interesting part of the video is where Chris “reveals” a niche that’s been pulling him in $1500/day on average in ClickBank affiliate commissions (note this is not profit — the advertising costs aren’t subtracted from that figure). This niche is, get this, the magical water fuel cell. Apparently (and this is news to me) you can run you car on gas and water by using your battery power to convert water into oxyhydrogen which can then be used as fuel. Before you get all excited, though, let me note the following warning in the Wikipedia entry:
Oxyhydrogen is often mentioned in conjunction with devices that claim to increase automotive engine efficiency or to operate a car using water as a fuel. Many of these claims, prima facie, violate the Laws of thermodynamics.
OK, it’s a product of a dubious nature. Still, we’re not here to criticize the choice of niche but rather to talk about what Chris is doing with it.
It’s quite simple, really, he’s built a simple review page that compares three separate “run your car on water” type products (all from ClickBank) and recommends one over the other two. This is pretty old school stuff — see my Beating AdWords review.
What Nemesis claims to bring to the table are tools to help you find profitable niches and create similar review-style landing pages. Oh, did I mention it was a $67/month membership program?
Sponsored Link: Try the Google Suggest Explorer for long-tail keyword ideas.
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.
Tags: AdSense, affiliate, Affiliate Project X, ClickBank, Google, Google Nemesis, review
The Unofficial AdSense Blog’s 3rd Anniversary!
I’ve been so busy lately that I can’t believe I let this slip by: The Unofficial AdSense Blog (this very blog) recently passed its third anniversary. This post is #954, which means I’ve been averaging about 318 posts per year… almost one per day on average.
Looking back, it’s interesting to see how much the blog’s changed. As some of you know, the blog started as a companion for my book Make Easy Money With Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program. The first post, Web Hosting Is Never Perfect, is really kind of lame, just me talking about problems I had with my hosting service at the time. This is back when the blog was on the domain MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com. (I eventually had to move away from using that domain because Google stopped serving ads to it because the domain name had “Google” in it.)
The next few posts were mostly filler until the book started shipping on June 17 — see Make Easy Money With Google Is Now Shipping and which I followed up with a press release on the subject. This was the first printed book published about the AdSense program, and I was (and still am) quite proud of it. I wrote it for a non-techie audience and I think I covered the topic fairly well for that audience.
What I’m going to do over the next few days is publish a retrospective of the blog and how AdSense has evolved over the past three or so years. Stay tuned!
Sponsored Link: Looking for content? Try the Toolinator’s Article Gatherer.
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.
No Excuses for PSAs
Every once in a while I come across an AdSense site displaying public service ads. A public service ad (PSA) is a generic non-paying ad that Google displays when it can’t find a suitable ad to display from its giant inventory of AdWords ads. PSAs promote charitable causes like the Red Cross. They don’t make the AdSense publisher any money and they don’t look that great, either. A site with PSAs sticks out like a sore thumb, IMHO.
There are no excuses for displaying PSAs. If your site is displaying PSAs, you’re doing something wrong. Here are some quick tips on avoiding PSAs:
- Make sure you’re not blocking the AdSense crawler. Verify that your robots.txt file is letting in all the right crawlers. You can do this easily using Google’s Webmaster Tools. (If you have no robots.txt file, the crawler can visit without any problems.)
- Put keywords in the URLs! If you don’t have your primary keywod in your domain name (I certainly don’t on this site) then try to make sure it’s in the rest of the URL. If you’re running a blog, this means making sure the post slug includes a keyword or two. It’s usually pretty easy to do. This trick lets me develop websites locally on my own machine and still see relevant ads on my “draft” website without having to deploy the site to a real domain.
- Put relevant keywords in the content. Sounds dumb, but obviously some people don’t do this. Use standard SEO (search engine optimization) techniques: keywords in title, headings, main body text… bold one or two, italicize maybe… the usual stuff. Not only will this help your targeting, it will also help your search engine traffic!
But let’s say you’ve done everything possible and PSAs are still showing up. Maybe your topic doesn’t have enough advertisers. Maybe you pissed someone off at Google. If you see PSAs on some of your pages, use the alternate URL feature to display your own content (could be an ad from another ad network, or maybe just a nice image you created) in place of the PSAs.
Or just remove AdSense entirely.
No excuses!
Sponsored Link: Looking for content? Try the Toolinator’s Article Gatherer.
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.
Is Google A Search Company Anymore?
I was looking at AdvertisingAge’s Digital Family Trees 2008 chart (it’s a big PDF — you can also view the interactive version in your browser) and once again I was struck by how far Google has drifted away from its core search mandate to become the dominant online advertisement delivery service.
Google isn’t a conventional media company, of course, because it doesn’t produce its own content. Nor is it an advertising company in the strictest sense because it doesn’t do creatives. It in fact bridges the two.
I wonder if at some point working at Google will lose its cachet because of all of this.
Sponsored Link: Learn about Invisible Fence systems and what we went through…
Tags: AdSense, advertising, Google, media
AdSense Referrals Officially Dead
If you haven’t heard the news, after first limiting which countries were eligible, Google has decided to eliminate the AdSense referrals program. In other words, you won’t be able to make any money by referring someone to the AdSense program.
Personally, I don’t think this is a big deal. I’ve had issues with the program from the start. I know there are a few big earners out there that made money with referrals, but they were typically targeting people “new” to AdSense. And with so many people using AdSense these days, perhaps the market’s mostly dried up anyhow.
Presumably all the ads will go blank and take no space after the deadline passes. It’d be a pain to go back and edit posts and pages where you’ve inserted the (fake) text link versions, for example.
Sponsored Link: Try the Google Suggest Explorer for long-tail keyword ideas.
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.