Tag: google

January 16, 2006 / Search Engine Optimisation
January 9, 2006 / Search Engine Optimisation

On a whim I decided to purchase the domain Top 100 vBulletin and put a wsnlinks directory on the site to rank vBulletin forums.

The only requirement is that External Data is turned on giving me access to external.php.

I’m then ranking the forums based on

  • Number of threads
  • Ratings by visitors to the directory
  • Google’s PR

December 21, 2005 / Other Stuff

One of the key problems with the internet is the fact that you never get to really interact with the people whose services you are using. This might mean a company or person is misrepresented, either to their benefit or detriment. Chat rooms amplify the problem on a personal level but all “clicks only” present an image that may, or may not, represent reality.

Google is trying to overcome that problem within it’s own company with their Google Space initiative – a retail type stand at major UK airports. They’ve rightly noticed that at airports you have “dead time” with little to do. Shopping isn’t always a great idea but surfing, checking email and forums just might be.

December 7, 2005 / Technical Discussions

I received this email today from a blogspot user

Sarah, I’m hoping you have advice for me about my Blog. On my “homepage” Business & Technology Reinvention the adsense ads have low relevance to the content on the page. But when I open an individual post the adsense relevance is excellent (for example Winning Against Big R&D Spenders)

Given that most of my traffic comes to my home page I’m concerned that the low relevance ads dilute the focus of my Blog. Do you have any advice or suggestions to improve?

David

Google, via it’s MediaPartners bot and Googlebot, are very effective at reading a page, nutting out the essence of it and returning the correct ads.

They seem to have a blindspot, though, when it comes to blogs which use Blogger or Blogspot blogs – as these seem to attract more than their fair share of ads for other blogging systems.

November 16, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that I’ve just launched RealState and am building up the functionality. It’s early days, and the domain is sandboxed so I’m not terribly anxious about how much traffic it gets – not yet anyway!

But I was thinking that I should put WebAnalyse onto it so that I have some tracking and I stumbled over another blog talking about Google Analytics. I shuddered at the thought of Google getting into the hitcounter game, it seemed like such a backward step. And I usually like to control my data but Google is trusted, surely they won’t shut up shop and leave me statistics-less?

November 1, 2005 / Search Engine Optimisation

We don’t get out of town terribly often due to sports and family commitments. When we do we often just catch up with friends at the Pauanui holiday home.

However this weekend we’re headed up north and needed to find somewhere to stay. Friends had talked enthusiastically about a site called “What If” so I thought I’d take a look. Hunts around on Google failed to turn the site up!

October 12, 2005 / Mambo / Joomla
October 9, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Adsense for Search (AFS) is the system where you have a Google search box on your site to present targetted ads. Personally I don’t see the attraction but plenty do.

I’ve become aware of an interesting scenario this week exploiting Adsense for Search, one way was smart and I liked it. The other was pure spam.