Scorn of a Woman; Adsense Spam For Webmasters

A wise word for the men out there...Don't flirt with a model on the radio station that your wife knows you work at. You may lose nice things.

Actual Ebay Listing.

Adsense Spam For Webmasters
Google Adsense is "trying" to crack down on the scraper sites that are plauging the SERPs. Jenstar is reporting that Google has a new feature. When you click on the "Ads by Google" link on any Adsense banner you'll be taken to page that lets you report about it. Via ThreadWatch

New Orleans WMW Conference

If you haven't been reading Barry and Aaron's live blogging via WebmasterWorld 2005 New Orleans, you really should jump over there and catch-up. Personally, I haven't heard anything that hasn't already been said, but you might find some nuggets of information.

FT.com Recap; MTV buys...

A little update on FT.com's hidden link scandal. Looks as though FT.com didn't know they were doing anothing thing wrong. Well, they weren't. It's there website and they can do whatever they want, it's just Google may not like hidden links all to well. :)

MTV buys Neopets
I remember Neopets a while ago. Looks like MTV has picked up the major social gathering of young kids to play with Pokemon like figures...online.

I noticed on my Black Hat vs. White Hat post I didn't actually link to the Black Hat Forum...ooops. : Here you go.

Discussions with a Black Hat; Funny GOOG movie

Randfish, of SEOMoz, has a great exchange of e-mails he's posted on his blog. What's really excellent about this post is how 'Mick' goes into some details about a recent site he established and the amount of income that was gained, as well as traffic. Great post.

GOOG Movie
Ran across this movie and thought it was hilarious. Nice little jiggle too!

Tags: Search Engine Marketing, Black Hat, Google

Black Hat and White Hat Forums

If you're interesting in learning some of the dark arts of SEO, jump over to the Black Hat Forum. I haven't had a chance to look over the threads there, to see if they're worth my time, but it's good to know what can and does work in this industry.

As for White Hatters, you can go to several White Hat forums.

Tags: Black Hat, White Hat, Search Engine Marketing

Adsense Pissing You Off? Alternatives...

Some people have been very pissed off at Google adsense and the way things are run. Others like the $XX,XXX checks they receive in the mail every month. Either way, here are some alternates:

Clicksor
TargetPoint
MarketBanker
BidClix
Chitika
AllFeeds
Adhearus
AffiliateSensor
Bidvertiser
Veoda
RevenuePilot
Kanoodle
Enhance Interactive
Quigo

Threadwatch points to a few others as well. Tim was the original poster and really breaks down the other adsense alternatives.

Tags: Adsense, Search Engine Marketing

MarketingSherpa's 10 Best Blogs 2005

MarketingSherpa has just tallied up the votes on their 2005 Best Blog awards. I recommend you going to each blog and stuffing their RSS feeds into your RSS aggregator/reader. I've subscribed to about 2/3's of the winners...looks like I need to stuff them into my reader too.

Tag: Marketing, Blogs, RSS

Yahoo! Save | Block

If you haven't noticed already, Yahoo! has implemented a "Save | Block" feature on their search results. If you were logged into your "My Web" feature, you wouldn've always seen them, but now Y! is showing this feature even when you're not logged in. Interesting. Danny Sullivan has also stated that the "Block" feature is pretty powerful, powerful enough to completely remove your site from that results page. Ouch!

Ebay Launches Business Site
Ebay has setup www.EbayBusiness.com, which is mainly for B2B consumers. I wonder if they'll be using this site in conjunction with any new purchases.

Tag: Yahoo!, Ebay, Search Engine

Hidden Links on FT.com; Google Maps Hack

Financial Times seems to be doing a little hidden linking. Not really sure why they wouldn't use anchor text or just display the site openly, rather then hidding it with background text. More importantly, how will Google handle situations like this. GOOG can be very swift and clean (clip) when it comes to little publishers/webmasters doing these sort of tactics, but what up a "authoritative" site?

Google Maps Hack
Another cool Google maps hack. This site takes census information and displays it onto the map of the US. Pretty nifty. Let's see if Google decides to keep this one up.

Tags: Google Maps, Financial Times

The Power of Tags

Wow! I had no idea the amount of traffic you can get with tags. So I started a new blog the other day and decided "hey, why not try one of those tags from technorati?!". To my utter amazement, I received 100 people to the blog, from 1-2 a day. Amazing! I'm definitely going to start using more tags in my blogs.

Here's what a Technorati tag looks like: Search Engine Marketing

New Adsense Ads

There are new Google Adsense ads being displayed now. Jensense has spotted the new horizontal ways to display ads links. There are some discussions about at SEW and WMW.

Too Many Passwords to Remember

If you're like me, you have too many passwords to remember. To keep your login/password (ps) as secure as possible, you're advised to add various characters and numerals to each password you construct, along with different login/ps's for each site that requires them. Now, who actually does that? If you do, I bow down to you. I sure don't

Chris Sherman did a nice little write up of RoboForm, a safe and secure way to manage all the various login's and passwords you have.

FireFox Bandwagon

If you're not on, you might want to jump on. I personally still use IE, but I jump back from FF when I'm doing some analysis on competitor sites. DaveN does a great job listing some of the excellent extensions that have been built for Firefox. I recommend picking some of them up and have some fun picking apart your competitors...and your own. :)

ArticleCity.com ...What's up?

I've noticed www.articlecity.com hasn't been taking any new submissions of articles and I'm wondering what's going on. It's been over a month now and still no updates? Are their servers overloaded?

They're one of the main article directories online. I'm sure their pages drive plenty of Adsense revenue for them to continue keeping it up and running.

Here are some other article directories:

www.goarticles.com
www.article-emporium.com
www.ideamarketers.com
www.ezinearticles.com
www.valuablecontent.com

Also, check out this list of article submissions if you're going the "Article marketing" route.

A recent post I made at AssociatePrograms.com

I think Brett's 26 steps is a great guide to follow, affiliate site or not.

It's becoming continually harder to spam and manipulate Google. The other search engines it's no problem, but if you want to have great placement in Google, continue (daily) building up a site worth being mentioned, clicked on, or bought from. Flush out a resource on the net that you can be proud of.

Building these kinds of sites will only help you sustain a REAL business model online, rather then building 100's of spammy/semi-spammy sites that can last only months.

On another note, don't let the Sandbox get you down. Follow the 26 steps. If it takes a year, then it takes a year. Don't abandon a project that could reap an extra $100, $1000, $10,000 $100,000 etc.. a day/month/year.

Low Fat = More Money

This is my little rant. I don't usually do this, but it got me thinking the other day. In this wonderful country of over-weight people, we have an abundance of unhealthy foods at our fingertips, which luckily, are very cheap for the general population.

Ok, my rant. I'm trying to eat healthy. Particularly where it counts the most...when you're out on the go and you need something fast (food). I find myself paying double to eat healthy at fast food joints. What is that?

Here's a concept...it might be a little mindblogling, but hey, let's give it a whirl...lower the price on healthy foods! WOW! Amazing concept, yes, I know.

Anyway, some Internet news:

Ebay bought Shopping.com
This is pretty big news and could bring a whole new ballpark to the term PowerSeller.

I've been playing around with RSStoBlog and it's a pretty cool application. I'll let you know more about it once I have my case study done.

Nuggets of Information from GoogleGuy

Wow, what a super post over at Webmasterworld. GoogleGuy really opens up and let's his fingers go. Lot's of great questions and excellent answers from GG. If I were you, I would go through and read the Q&A session with GG.

Corey Rudl dies at 34

I really couldn't believe the news this morning that Corey Rudl had died. Someone so influential in the online world has passed away. Corey wasn't just a guy who made a lot of money online, he was a poineer and changed peoples lives everyday. He will be truly missed.

I don't think it really has set in. I remember when I was 14 (22 now) and I designed my first e-commerce site. Corey's site was an inspiration to my online ventures. I never bought any of his products, but I've been told they were some of the best of the net. Forums around the net are in shock and it just doesn't seem like it really could have happened.

I've been told his favorite thing was racing cars and he loved Porsche. Corey died while at the California Speedway racing a 911 Porsche.

Read up on the news coverage and what happened to Corey Rudl.

Ken Calhoun has just set up a memorial website for Corey Rudl.

Call to Action

I recently purchased Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg's "Call to Action" via Amazon. I've heard a lot of good things about these brothers. They seem to be the definitive source for improving online results and conversions. You can check out their Future Now, Inc website and buy the book. I highly recommend it. I'll probaby do some sort of critique of the book when I'm finished.