Google’s policy against clicking AdSense ads on your own website continues to annoy me. This time, it was a post on the Inside AdSense blog that drew my ire:
However, we strongly advise against using your own AdSense for search box for a couple of reasons. First, it can increase the chance of accidental or invalid clicks on the ads that appear on the search results pages. Second, this will inflate the number of queries in your reports, giving you an inaccurate picture of the activity on your site.
I search the archives of this site almost daily in search of relevant links to things I’ve written about previously. I’d hate to see this site’s AdSense income wiped out due to clicking on ads served to me based on what I searched for just because they were served on my own site.
The ads site-search ads are, obviously, highly relevant to what I searched for, so clicking makes sense.
Google’s policy of discouraging clicking ads they serve against my own searches makes my site less usable for me.
As I’ve mentioned before, Google needs to come up with a setting that allows users to claim their own sites, then simply not compensate the site owner for clicks they generate themselves. This would make site owner’s own sites more valuable to themselves and benefit Google’s advertisers who would receive more traffic from site owners who could click with confidence.
Google announced yesterday that that made a change to how long they’ll associate a search with an IP address in order to better protect user’s privacy:
Another step to protect user privacy
We’ll anonymize IP addresses on our server logs after 9 months. We’re significantly shortening our previous 18-month retention policy to address regulatory concerns and to take another step to improve privacy for our users.
Is this good?
What if I WANT Google to know more about me for longer? Now that they’ve dropped the time period to under a year, will I see less relevant results on searches I conduct annually?
For example, what I happen to like “Rose” wine, and like to purchase it for a friend’s birthday each February. Wouldn’t it be nice if Google knew I was looking for the wine and not the flower? By storing data for a year+ they may be able to do a better job with this.
What happens when someone searches for your name? Do they find you? Do they find other people by the same name?
There are obvious benefits to showing up when someone searches for you. Especially if the results on the page have nice things to say about you.
Here is a shot of the top-10 results on Google for my name as of today:
Currently, I’m 10 for 10, meaning the Ed Kohler that shows up for each of the top-10 results is me. In fact, it looks like I’m the Ed Kohler that shows up in 89 of the first 100 results.
I spend more time than average on the web, and have a somewhat unique (but not entirely unique) name, so I tend to have a strong representation in search results.
But even if you don’t spend a ton of time online, there are some relatively simple things you can do to improve the percentage of top-10 search results you control for your own name.
1. Have a blog. And use your name on it.
2. Sign up and occasionally use social networking sites that have strong rankings like Twitter, Blip.tv, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Flickr.
3. Have a bio page on your company’s website.
4. Contribute comments to blogs that interest you.
5. Create a public profile on Amazon.
6. Create a video of yourself and distribute it to lots of video sites using TubeMogul.com.
7. Do things worth writing about.
If none of that works, just set a new record for Olympic gold medals.
Here are a few advanced searches that are incredibly valuable:
1. “quoting phrases” will search for the words within the quote in only that order. This is especially valuable when searching for people.
2. Searching within a site: site:technologyevangelist.com twitter brings back pages from this site that include the term “twitter”
3. -negatives Throw a minus sign in front of a word to filter out results including that term. Say, you’re interested in the Olympics, but not gymnastics, diving, or equestrian. No problem: olympics -gymnastics -diving -equestrian
4. Top level domains: Want to find out what government agencies are saying about global warming? Try this: site:gov “global warming”
5. Google Alerts: Take searches that interest you and track them using Google Alerts. Whenever Google discovers something new on the web matching your search criteria they’ll email it to you.
What would you add?
Google came out with a post the other day clarifying different types of clicks they don’t charge advertisers for, when detected. They break down into two categories: fraudulent clicks and invalid ones. Frauduent clicks are generally defined as those there someone is motivated to click for financial gain while invalid ones are double clicks and other things of little value to the advertiser.
Below is Google’s examples of fraudulent clicks (emphasis mine).
Inside AdSense: Defining invalid clicks and click fraud
Click fraud is a subset of invalid clicks that are generated with malicious or fraudulent intent — in other words, clicks that are intended to drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue artificially. Sources for these clicks include, but are not limited to:
- A publisher clicking on his own ads, or encouraging clicks on his ads
-Users or family members clicking to support the site / publisher
- Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-click services and click-exchanges
- Automated clicking tools, robots, or other deceptive software
What blows my mind is that Google - to this day - does not offer a way for publishers to identify themselves to Google in a way that would allow them to click on ads on their own site without being considered a fraud. For example, I write articles on this site, and I spend a decent amount of time looking at the site in order to view comments, so I see the ads from Google that I’ve embedded in the site. Since Google’s ads are specifically targeted to the content I wrote, they often appear relevant to my interests. Yet clicking on them would be considered fraudulent by Google’s definition.
What I’d like to see is a way to let Google know that I’d like to click on ads on my own site that appear relevant to me. Don’t pay me for clicking on the ad. Decide for yourself my clicks are valuable enough to still charge the advertiser for a portion of the click. But don’t criminalize my behavior.
According to TechDirt, Google is being sued by a lawyer who claims Google has been practicing “fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment” because he didn’t get any leads out of $136.11 he spent on pay per click advertising.
His perceived underperformance comes from the source of traffic he was being charged for. The ads he is upset with Google about ran on parked domains and error pages. Pages, he feels, are incapable of delivering valuable, lead generating traffic.
This seems confusing on many many levels to me. Here are a few other things he could do rather than sue:
1. He could test the performance of his ads, then make adjustments to his campaign if he’s not satisfied with the results. A $136.11 lesson learned.
2. He could check the box within his Google AdWords account that would prevent his ads from showing on content related sites. In general, pay per click search traffic converts at a higher rate. However, for that reason, it also tends to cost more per click.
3. He could lower his bids for content targeted traffic. It probably would convert for him eventually. For the right price per click, he’d probably be very satisfied with the results.
4. He could work on his own website to improve the conversion rate. Perhaps there are things he could have done to his site that would have allowed him to generate leads from the traffic he did receive?
I don’t think I could explain this any better than Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim, who wrote:
I’m guessing that his ad campaign just plain sucked. After all, if it didn’t, surely he’d have enough leads coming in from Google’s other channels to keep him busy enough to not have time for frivolous lawsuits.
A class-action of people who didn’t read the manual.
I’ve become a big fan of Google Spreadsheets over the past few months for a number of reasons. The primary being the ability to collaboratively work on a single spreadsheet simultaneously from more than one location. That’s a powerful feature that’s particularly valuable in data gathering situations.
But it has a few limitations that are worth noting as of this writing. Over time, I see no reason why they won’t get worked out, but they could be deal killers for you today depending on how you use spreadsheets.
1. No multi-column sort. Say you want to sort ascending by column C, then ascending by column D so D breaks the ties of column C. You can’t do that today. Only one-column sorting is supported.
2. Clipboard limitations. You can only copy 1000 cell’s worth of data at a time. So a 250 row x 9 column spreadsheet would take a minimum of 3 copy/pastes to move somewhere else (offline or to a different online spreadsheet). It copies the first 1000 cell’s worth of rows, so it’s easy to tell where it left off, but it’s still painful if you deal with spreadsheets of any weight.
3. Safari formatting. Spreadsheets works in Safari, but I’ve had some issues with cell focusing. For example, clicking into a cell will often focus my cursor in the cell above the one I wanted. It’s not the end of the world, but not as polished as I’d expect.
4. Limited menus. Spreadsheets supports a lot more commands than the limited menus would lead you to believe. If you have experience with other spreadsheets like Excel, try using the commands shortcuts from there to see if they’re supported. Fill-down is an example that comes to mind. Spreadsheets does it, but there is no menu option for it today.
What would you add to this list?
Don’t try this at home.
I bumped up my Google Reader subscriptions last night from around 350 to 7570 for a work project. Fortunately, the blogs are very low volume so the increase in blog consumption wouldn’t be that significant.
However, it turns out that Google Reader had some problems with this:
Or, more specifically, Firefox or Safari would both time out before opening my subscriptions.
Luckily, Google offers a subscription management page under the Settings tab so I was able to filter for, and unsubscribe from, the newly added large batch.
Now I’m looking for other ideas on how to make this work. I tried using Yahoo Pipes to generate a single RSS feed from a 7000+ feed OPML file but ran into time-out issues with that as well.
Do you have any ideas worth trying? I’m sure Google Reader can handle the post volume - just not the individual feed volume - so how can I generate an aggregate feed of a large OPML file?
As a videocaster I try to keep up on the latest and greatest video players out there. From YouTube to Blip.tv to Revver to Google Video and many, many, many others. It seems that time and time again I end up using the Google Video player to embed video on my web site, and I would like to share with you why.
There are several things that Google does right when it comes to their player.
First, they understand that some videocasters may be looking to legitimately create longer form content. Sites such as YouTube (ironically also owned by Google) limit new accounts to 10 minutes of upload time only in an attempt to stop copyright infringement. All this really does is break the illegal clip up in to 4 segments, annoys users and stops nothing.
Second, Google understands that the Internet is a worldwide distribution medium. While I produce my new videocast SpaceVidcast in English, I have many episodes translated to as many languages as possible. Using the Google Video tools I’m able to upload a transcript and translation of the video to the service giving everyone a chance to view the material in their native language. Google has the ability to have multiple closed caption streams added to a single video. Check out the sample below from my Epsiode 002 SpaceVidcast (we run about 3 weeks behind in transcoding, although the larger the community gets the more we catch up).
Third, I can start playing from anywhere in the clip, but it doesn’t appear to be streaming. What the heck do I mean by this? Google Video uses an advanced form of progressive download which means that no matter your bandwidth you’ll be able to watch the video (it may take a while to download enough of the clip if your connection is slow). The problem with progressive download is that if you have a 2 hour clip and want to jump 90 minutes in you have to wait until that part has downloaded. Streaming video allows me to jump anywhere in the video but if I don’t have enough bandwidth between the server and the client they won’t be able to watch the clip. Google Video has a combination of both. I can jump anywhere in the clip even if it has not downloaded that part yet and watch from that moment in time even if I don’t have enough bandwidth for a real-time stream. It is the best of all worlds.
Finally, I think the biggest and coolest feature of Google Video is the ability to send a link that allows me to start at any time in the video. I have the ability to copy the video’s URL and add a time marker at the end to jump to that exact moment in time. If I want to share a part of the video that is 9 minutes in with a friend, just add a #13m32s to the end of the Google Video URL. While this feature was introduced back in 2006 it seems that most other video sharing sites didn’t see the power in that feature which is really too bad.
There are disadvantages of Google Video too. The encode quality just has not kept up with the rest of the industry. The audience base simply isn’t at Google Video, frankly they are at YouTube. Google seems to have mostly abandoned the Google Video project in favor of YouTube (which they purchased for a kabillion, zillion dollars). Tracking videos and plays on Google Video is abysmal (which is a big deal too). And the list goes on.
In the end I know that I have a worldwide community of people who want to see and understand my content. By using DotSub and a lot of community help I am able to make this happen with Google Video but not YouTube, Blip.tv, Brightcove, Revver, etc.
Do you have a favorite videocasting service? Do you know of a better service that allows for multiple languages, long form content and the ability to link to any moment in time for the video clip? Or do you completely disagree with my assessment of how the 2006 Google Video player trumps most 2008 players on the market today? Leave your insight in our comments!
I just wrapped up a speaking tour where I created all of my presentations using Google’s new web based presentations application. This is a look at how that worked.
As a preface, the presentations I created were screen show heavy with only an occasional use of text.
What worked well:
1. Creating slides. This was as easy as clicking New Slide and importing an image for the slide from my computer. My general workflow was to grab a screenshot of a website (or part of website) which auto-copied as a .PNG to my desktop. I’d then browse and select the image which would import it into the presentation. Most common image formats can be imported.
2. Sorting Slides. Moving slides around within a presentation is much like PowerPoint. You have to be a bit more careful about where you click to select a slide, but the workflow is the same.
3. Transitions. I’m not a big fan of slide transitions. Google Presentations doesn’t offer any slide transitions options, so that’s easy to avoid. If you’re someone who’s addicted to sliding bulletpoints onto the screen or using Scooby Doo effects between slides, this is not for you.
4. Presentation Export. Presenting directly from the web can be risky since you can’t always count on Internet connections. Google offers an option to export the presentation as a .PDF which works great for presenting. I’m using a Mac, where the default PDF viewer is Preview. That program pulled up a navigational menu on the screen every time I advanced a slide, so I switch to Acrobat Reader to solve this problem.
What Didn’t Work
I only ran into one critical issue, but it was a big one.
With each speaking stop, I’d copy the previous presentation to start a new one, modify it, then export the revisions as a .PDF for the presentation. I ran into an issue where the .PDF export didn’t work. The presentation would export but the file was corrupt and couldn’t be opened with Acrobat or Preview on my Mac. I couldn’t figure out how to troubleshoot it, so I rebuilt my presentation in time to present it.
Themes: This wasn’t a big one, but I couldn’t figure out how to upload a custom theme / background for my presentation. It wasn’t a big deal for me, since I find logos on every slide distracting, but I could see this being a big issue for many presenters.
Overall, I was impressed with the service. Based on how I build presentations, it worked great for me.
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