AdMoolah News and Views

Yahoo Publishing Network announced today that they have started to display unique ads across multiple ad units on a single page. Previously, if there were multiple ads units on a single page the same ads would be duplicated in each ad unit. Now the ads will be unique.

It surprises me that it took Yahoo this long to make the change. It’s something AdSense has done for as long as I can remember, and something a lot of publishers noticed right away as a deficiency in the system

There have been some premature reports about the death of the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool. Apparently Yahoo has not killed this tool, it is just running very slowly due to it being overloaded.

YahooSarah has this to say in a DigitalPoint thread:

I wanted to confirm that YSM’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.

We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

Many webmasters who relied on this tool as a free way of finding keyword suggestions, and they won’t be happy about this. Luckily Wordtracker quickly stepped up and have provided a free keyword suggestion tool of their own to use. With this tool, you enter keywords, and it comes back with the top 100 suggested keywords and the estimated daily search volume for those keywords.

Performancing Partners ad network is closing at the end of the month. At the end of last month they announced that the ad network was to be sold to PayPerPost, but then the deal was canceled.

They have also recently announced that they are no longer running their metrics program. This leaves them with their Performancing for Firefox Blogging tool.

(I hope you don’t mind me plugging my new site again, but I am sure this announcement will appeal to a lot of you.)

I have enabled a new feature on SEOyak.com. Whenever you submit a story, you can create a text ad that will be displayed permanently on the story page. SEOyak.com participants know the value of a text link, so it should be a great incentive for users to start to submit stories. Here are details of the ad program.

So sign up now, or if you are already signed up, go submit a story.

JenSense, again has the scoop on the new AdSense policy changes: It’s official! You can now run AdSense on the same page as other contextual ad programs

So it seems that Google tightened things a little by not allowing similar looking ads to appear on a site, but at the same time loosened things by allowing other contextual ads on the same page. Note however, the YPN’s terms do not allow YPN to be on the same page as other contextual ads, so you still can’t run AdSense and YPN on the same page.

Thanks to Jennifer for staying on top of this for us. Know we just need to figure out how different ads need to be in order to be considered different looking.

Google has updated their AdSense program policies. There are many small changes, but there is also one major change: If publishers use ad networks other than AdSense anywhere on their sites, they must now make sure the ads look different. JenSense has the details of all the changes and a special post on the competitive ad policy.

This is going to effect many publishers, myself included. It is currently standard practice to run A/B tests with Google and other ad networks. You randomly rotate Google ads with ads from another network using the same formats and color schemes, and see which one performs the best. This will no longer be possible. It is also common to display ads from other non-contextual ad networks in formats that are very similar to AdSense. Again this will no longer be possible.

This is going to cause a lot of confusion and questions for publishers. There has been a lot of debate on the forums about how acceptable it is to display an image close to an ad. I think trying to figure out what is acceptable for competitive ads is going to be even more difficult. The new policy states:

In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

But what is considered the same color, if you have AdSense in dark green and Chitika ads in light green, is that different enough? If you always use leaderboards for AdSense and skyscrapers for Yahoo, is that different enough? Is adding a border enough?

There is going to be a lot of talk about this on the forums and in blogs. People are not going to like this.

Well, I’m going to be busy the next few days trying to figure this out and implement the changes on my website. AdSense has never performed very well for me on AdMoolah, so I think I’m going to switch to Miva MC to give it a try.

Today MIVA launched a new self service advertising platform for publishers call MIVA Monetization Center (or MIVA MC).

MIVA MC includes three different advertising options for publishers.

1. Content Ads. These are similar to the AdSense and YPN that we all know. One unique thing about them is you can choose to have them contextually driven, or keyword driven. This is a feature that a lot of publishers wish Google had, so it could be attractive for a lot of people.
2. Inline Ads. These ads are underlines words in the content of the website. When a visitor hovers over the underlined test, an ad is displayed. I personally find these ads very annoying and wouldn’t use them on my own sites.
3. Search Ads. These can be used to display ads in search pages on the publishers own site. This seems very similar to AdSense for Search.

One bonus for small publishers is that the payout is only a $25 minimum and can be done via PayPal.

Another point in their favor is that there is no exclusivity clause. They don’t mind you having ads from another network on the same page. Since their Content Ads have a keyword option, they should be allowed on the same page as AdSense as well.

Another great thing is that they will be letting the publisher know what the revenue split is.

Unfortunately for international publisher, keyword driven ads, search ads and revenue spit transparency are available only to U.S. publisher right now.

I have filled out an application and will experiment with them if I get accepted.

Update: I have been accepted into the program. It took less than 4 hours!

A hacker has been targeting many SEO sites and has already successfully taken over many of them, including WolfHowl and Stuntdubl. I first noticed this on WolfHowl’s blog and I though it might be some sort of sneaky linkbait, but it seems to be legitimate. Here is the Hacker’s blog with his plan: http://fuckingpirate.wordpress.com/ (I won’t give him a link).

One of the tricks he was using was a WordPress security problem, which has since been fixed in version 2.0.7. If you use WordPress, I would recommend updating now. (Which I am about to do, hopefully this blog will survive the upgrade.)

There is a DigitalPoint thread on this topic.

Update: WordPress.com has now taken the hackers blog offline. Also, I successfully updated to WordPress 2.0.7

There is going to be yet another pay-to-blog service – SponsoredReviews.com. There are several existing services such as ReviewMe, PayPerPost and LoudLaunch that are very similar.

They mention a few differences that make them sound like they may be interesting:

• Lower Transaction Fees – that’s always good for the advertisers and bloggers.
• Manual Pricing – This could be good for advertisers finding good deals from bloggers who are willing to lower their prices

They should be launching in a few weeks.

Here is a list of things you can do if you want to annoy people, get blacklisted, or even arrested for your online marketing efforts. Webmasters often use these techniques thinking they are harmless, but there is a cost – these technique do cost people real time and money.

Imagine if you developed a robot that would go into a Starbucks every day and steal 4 packets of sugar. No big deal right? Who would miss, or even complain, about 4 packets of sugar? But now let’s pretend you had a thousand of these robots and sent them each into a Starbucks every hour. That’s 96,000 sugar packets a day or 35,040,000 packets of sugar a year. Starbucks is going to have something to say about that.

It’s the same with automated spamming techniques, a single piece of spam may not seem like a big deal – it’s just a little bandwidth, or CPU usage or disk space that’s used, but add it all up and you are doing some real damage. Even more damaging is the amount of time that people spend deleting and fighting spam.

Here are some of the common spam techniques, along with the reasons they work and how it causes damage.

1. Email Spam

This is the original spamming technique. Marketers send out mass, unsolicited emails.

Why it works

It’s a number game. If you send out 100 million emails, even if you get a .0001% response rate, you get ten thousand responses.

Why is this bad?

People spend countless hours deleting spam and setting up and configuring spam blocking systems. Spam counts for a huge percentage of all email and clutters mailboxes and wastes huge amount of disk space. I can’t even imagine all the CPU time consumed trying to filter all this junk.

2. Guest Book Spam

This is one of the original spammy SEO techniques. In the dark ages of the web, people would set up guest books where visitors could say “hi” and leave a little message. Spammers quickly found out that they could set up bots that create messages with links back to their own site.

Why it Works

Search engines use the number of backlinks to a site as one of the indicators of a good site. This technique abuses that indicator.

Why Is This Bad?

People spend a lot of time trying to clean up guest books. Disk space and bandwidth is also wasted with these spam messages.

3. Referrer Spam

These spammers send there bots to as many sites as they can, and set the referrer URL to the website address the spammer is trying to advertise. Some sites have publicly accessible web statistics, so these URLs end up on web pages.

Why it Works

Search engines that find these links from the publicly accessible web statistic pages may count them as a vote for the site being pointed at.

Why Is This Bad?

Bandwidth is wasted when the bots visit the site. A lot of time is spent by Webmasters trying to figure out who that particular link ended up in his referrer list.

4. Web Spam

Unscrupulous Webmasters create web sites that full of bogus content that attract search engine spiders, but are of no use to real use to real users.

Why it Works

Using automation, Webmasters can create thousands or millions of pages of content. This content gets displayed in search engine results for “long tail” key phrases where users are looking for very specific queries. Again it’s a numbers game, get enough of the long tail hits and you can get some good traffic. Contextual ads, such as AdSense, are put on the pages to monetize them.

Why Is This Bad?

Search engines indexes become polluted with content that is useless to users, making the entire web experience poorer for all users.

5. Splogs

Short for spam blogs, these are blogs full of automated junk are created.

Why it Works

Much like Web Spam, long tail keywords are a rich source of traffic, but blogs have the added benefit of being indexed quickly in many blog search engine as well as standard Web search engines.

Why Is This Bad?

Many splogs are created on free blog hosting services such as Blogger.com. This wastes the resources of the blog host. It also pollutes blog and regular search engines with lousy content, degrading the overall user experience on the web.

6. Blog Comment Spam

Automated comments are posted to blogs containing a link back to the spammers web site.

Why it Works

Since search engines count links as a vote for a site, this boosts the site’s rankings. Lately the “nofollow” tag has been added to links, but this seems to have done little to stop the flow of comment spam.

Why Is This Bad?

Blog owners spend a lot of time deleting this unwanted junk. People also spend a lot of time trying to set up systems to thwart the spam. Lots of disk space CPU time are wasted on this spam.

7. Forum Spam

Automated programs register as users with forums and then create posts with links back to the spammers web page.

Why it Works

Since search engines count links as a vote for a site, this boosts the site’s rankings.

Why Is This Bad?

Forum owners spend a lot of time deleting this unwanted junk. People also spend a lot of time trying to set up systems to stop the spam. Lots of disk space CPU time are wasted on this spam.

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