Google’s newest knife for the market pie

Long time to posts!

Looks like the current economic crisis couldn't make Google cease their innovation, here's the email I received yesterday from Google.

Hi,

 

We're writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

 

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

 

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

 

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

Which makes me realize that this blog doesn't even have a privacy policy! I'm pretty busy these days I can't even make a proper page for it :P. Therefore I hereby declare that the privacy policy of this site is subject to the latest policy of AdSense (at least to when I decide otherwise).

For the publisher, I don't think this would make much difference to their income. Web surfers visit a site because it currently contains the content they want. Take the sport enthusiast mentioned above for example, if she is only interested in sports news, she will see sports news channel ads everywhere (not really, I think the news ad percentage will only increase a little), even when she is trying to shop for sport instruments and vice versa. This behavior based kind of ads is possibly most benefit to Google because now they will be able to display ads that fit the user's behavior on their search pages based on user activity data you gathered. This may also be beneficial to some so called SEO groups where they use money from an unknown source to buy each other's product rapidly, thus receive huge income (and yes, that's money laundering). Now they can see more relevant ads for their purpose…

Privacy concerns may arise for the normal user, which is exactly why the European Union worried about the Doubleclick acquisition: now Google have just updated their policy to track everyone using their service. Well, there's nothing you can do about it except to trust them though; so far Google is trustworthy :). It's true that they censored search content for their Chinese interface but hey, at least they never disclosed user data to our bloodthirsty comrades like Yahoo!

Pinging can make true wonders when running a blog. However, when blogging for money or hobby, most of the bloggers don't know that they are playing with fire and can be called ping spammers.


Every time you click 'Save and Continue Editing' button, or edit the previously published post and click 'Save' - you are sending a ping. And now imagine that when working with a new post you click'Save and Continue Editing' 10-15 times; this is not much when you are working with a long post, do many changes in fonts and colors, etc. But for the ping services it means you pinged them 10-15 times. An attempt for ping spam? Who knows: each of the ping services can have its own inner policies about what ping exactly to start thinking that your blog is a ping spammer. But this is definitely the game not a single blogger would like to play.


Because it can result in a ping service to simply block your blog and stop taking the new post feeds from it. We can talk a lot about if this is fair or not, but ping services are definitely not interested to re-digest one and the same content (or almost the same content) all the time!

NB: This ping spam issue is peculiar to WordPress blogs, however other blog platforms seem to have most of the problems with ping spam unsolved as well.

How to Check If My Blog Crossed the Line?


Ping services don't say when exactly they are sure you are ping spammer, but these 2 signs can be very useful for you.

#1. Check the online accounts of your blog in ping services.


Some ping services, like Technorati, have a very useful feature of running "account" for each of the blogs on their server. When you know the URL to this account, you can check the account of your blog and see how quickly the ping service is gulping your new posts from this blog.


For example, if previously this service has been catching the fresh posts from your blog every 24 hours and was publishing their digest on the server, and now got stuck for 3-4 days - this is a possible sign of the blog getting ping spam penalty. It's crucial to note that thisis a POSSIBLE sign, because there are some factors that can also explain this sudden "gap in love" from a ping service.

#2. Check your ping list service messages.


If you are reading your ping messages (that say "pined successfully" or other tech messages), this information is another proof factor for you. The strategy is the same: if after no problems for a long time with a ping service all of a sudden you start getting messages that say that you have not been pinged successfully and no other traits of the problem (like a message saying that you have incompatible format of the ping signal or anything else) - this is another

possible sign of the ping spam penalty.

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog

Web analytics is a quantitative indicator of behavior of visitors to a website. Simply explained, web analytics involves identification of visitor, analyzing the reason of visit and tracking his/her movement within your website until the time he/she leaves the website. In essence therefore, web analytics provides a clear picture of the performance of a website so that the website owner can devise strategies to maximize acceptability of the website.


Web analytics mainly comes in two flavors in terms of collection of visitors' data. The first concerns collecting data from server logfile, and the second by tagging each webpage with javascript. A third web analytics method is a combination of the two whereby more relevant data can be produced than what is possible with either of the two methods.


In this article, we will briefly define some popular web analytics terms, moving on to comparing the two methods before outlining why studying web analytics is beneficial.

Key Web Analytics Terms

'Hit' denotes a request for a file from server and is recorded only in logfile. 'Page View' means different for the two web analytics methods. While tagging script considers the whole page as one request, the logfile on the other hand will record multiple hits (one for each file, including images, .js and .css) within a single page-view.


A visitor is one who requests for a file to be shown. Once again, while server log will record several files for each visit, the page-tagging script will only consider the page as a whole seen by the visitor. In either case, the web analytics data will clearly identify if the visitor is new (new or unique visitor) or has come before (repeat visitor).

Other Information


Both web analytics methods will be able to gather several other important information, notable among which are as under.


               1. The length of time a visitor spends in seeing a website. 


               2. The keyword phrase used to arrive at the website.


               3. The unique IP address and therefore the country from where the visits generated.


               4. The arrival and exit pages.

Logfile vs Page Tagging


Data transfer to and from web server is always recorded in server's logfile with clockwork precision. Since early days, realization dawned that it is possible for a suitable program to extract logfile data and arrange them in a meaningful display. That is how web analytics came into being. Today most servers come equipped with web analytics programs such as Webalizer, Awstats, etc. which analyze raw logfile data and portray valuable visitor information in easy-to-follow graphics.

This content was originally posted on http://guidetomoney.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog