Jenstar a Digitalpoint moderator

So Shawn over at Digitalpoint, has made the wisest decision since a few months ago.

He just jot Jenstar to moderate for DP.

As she is our contextual advertising guru, she will be visiting the Adsense and Yahoo Publisher categories more.

I’m actually happy Shawn made this decision. This means Jen will come there more often now, and that can only do good, not only to us (who know a little or two about contextual advertising) but to the whole Digitalpoint community.

I mean DP is really one of the best SEM forums out there.

I actually gave repetead e-mails to the Adsense and Google Blog (the last one more frequently), as how could they not include DP in the “what we read section”.

Anyway, I read her blog when i get the chance, and i’m happy to see her act there too.

Welcome Jen :)

PS: Discuss this here.

WebCEO 6.0 Released

WebCeo 6.0 Web CEOSo WebCEO 6.0 is released.

As ever, it’s still FREE :)

PS: I want to make this clear. I do not use the submit part of any software. I only use the monitoring part. You guys should do the same.

Automatic submissions are not only against the major search engine’s TOS, but are unneeded actions. To further strengthen this fact, just see my last note in this post.

As for the monitoring part, Web CEO is one of the best desktop tools out there, and did the job just fine for me, in the past.

What’s new :

  • Find Link Exchange Partners with Link Partner Finder. Before now, you could analyze the linking tactics of some of the most successful websites in your industry, spot their partners and approach them manually. Now, with this new tool, you can save a great deal of time.
  • This new tool allows you to contact the most successful (that is highly ranked websites) in either an automated or semi-automated way. Customizable email templates, partner evaluation and grouping, automatic extraction of email addresses from pages, correspondence scheduling – it’s all included and more!
  • Manage Your Paid Search Campaigns Through the PPC Campaigns Manager. This tool allows setting up and accessing accounts with the most prominent pay-per-click search engine programs such Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing from a single dashboard – putting you conveniently in control.
  • Sharing Reports With Your Clients and Colleagues. Client Center is a new tool in Web CEO (File > Client Manager) that allows sharing Web CEO reports with others through a small software program that can be installed on your clients or colleagues’ PCs. Most importantly, there is no mention of Web CEO, so if you deliver professional services with Web CEO your clients will not know that all you had to do is set up reporting options once and then only charge them regularly. At the moment this feature is in Beta and allows sharing reports for HitLens. Available to paid users.
  • New Workflow For Search Engine Optimization and New Features in the Optimization Tool. The Optimization tool now has a workflow similar to Editor. You can optimize multiple web pages. Improvements include keyword density analysis, search engine view (you can see how a search engine sees your pages), exact and non-exact keyword match analysis.
  • Auto-filling of Forms in the Submission Tool. To make manual submissions even easier, Web CEO will automatically fill in the information needed to submit a website. Normally you will only have to review and confirm a submission without having to type a word.
  • Building a List of Favorite Search Engines with the ‘SE Favorites’ feature.Create a customized search engine list in the Manual Submission section using your favorite search engines and directories.
  • Search Engine Saturation Reports in the Ranking Tool.The new report shows what pages from your website and competitors’ sites are visible to search engines with a breakdown by search engines.

To download, just go to the WebCEO download page. Save the installation kit to your computer and run it.

PS: The Web CEO website, is banned from Google.

Adsense referrals

So i was browsing trough my daily portion of Digitalpoint, suddenly noticing Crusader‘s blog post about Adsense referrals.

He got this mail from an Adsense representative, stating that Adsense has increased the publishers Adsense referral time limit to 180 days (period in which your referral must earn 100 USD for you to get your 100 USD commision), prior to the 90 days limit (which anyway appeared only in your Adsense referral account, in a small footer caption, NOT BEEING present in the How much will i earn from referrals section. It still isn’t.).

It seems that Adsense representatives got a lot of feedback from publishers, about this issue, so they acted upon it.

Altough, after digging about this myself, i didn’t found ANY official statement about this, neither on the Adsense help section, neither on the Adsense Blog.

Moreover, the line that exists (very small caption in the footer) in everybody’s Adsense Refferals account, still states :

An AdSense referral is counted when a publisher, who has never previously enrolled in AdSense, creates an account and earns at least $100.00 within 90 days of sign-up. The referred publisher must be eligible for payment to qualify as a successful referral.

So until i am convinced that this is official, i can’t pinpoint exactly. Anyway this would be a nice addition to every webmaster’s peace of mind.

One other nice feature, is that the Adsense account interface, has just changed a bit. This was happening just as i wrote this post, and it WAS kind of weird :)

Adsense

It seems that they grouped certain buttons :)

LOL : I see this in the footer now :

A Google AdSense referral is counted when a publisher, who has never previously enrolled in Google AdSense, creates an account and earns at least $100.00 within 180 days of sign-up. The referred publisher must be eligible for payment to qualify as a successful referral.

It’s Official then.

PS: What have we learned from this ? Always check things out (your sources) before you hit Save :D.

02.03.2006 later edit : Here is the official Adsense Blog post, which appeared lated, explaining the new “face lift” :)

Adsense Smart pricing lowers a publisher’s payout

It seems that Graywolf over at Threadwatch, has researched an important Adsense bit. Publishers with low-rated websites, might have their Adsense income lowered for all the websites in their account, trough the so-called “Smart pricing”.

Darren, who’s a DigitalPoint member too, wrote at ProBlogger about this issue, and made a practical test about it.

Altough one month is a pretty low and not enough time span to say that the test is veritable, it still poses a question to all of us.

Discuss this issue at Digital Point Forums.

Pagerank prediction tool test, Part 2

I previously wrote part one of a pagerank prediction tool test. Well now it’s the time to see the results of all those pagerank prediction tools out there :

Google Toolbar Pagerank for the test websites, BEFORE the 18.02.2006 Pagerank export:

http://www.xperts.ro – PR 5/10
http://www.webxperience.org – PR 5/10
http://www.lamit.ro – PR 5/10
http://www.seo-xperts.com – PR 4/10
http://www.seopedia.org – PR 0/10
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – PR 0/10
http://www.bullguard.com – PR 7/10
http://www.teste-seo.ro – PR 0/10
http://directory.xperts.ro – PR 4/10
http://forum.xperts.ro – PR 4/10

Real, current Google Toolbar Pagerank for the test websites, AFTER the 18.02.2006 pagerank export:

http://www.xperts.ro – PR 6/10
http://www.webxperience.org – PR 5/10
http://www.lamit.ro – PR 5/10
http://www.seo-xperts.com – PR 4/10
http://www.seopedia.org – PR 4/10
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – PR 0/10
http://www.bullguard.com – PR 7/10
http://www.teste-seo.ro – PR 2/10
http://directory.xperts.ro – PR 4/10
http://forum.xperts.ro – PR 4/10

So as i said before, all those god damn tools, are just plain unreliable. I think the IT Xperts‘s PR6 prediction by iWebTool (which was the closest guesser, of them all) was just a simple coincidence, and not a simple drop of tehnique.

The XML pagerank output method with which these tools thought to discover the yet unreleased PR, seems to be a new startingpoint for them. But they haven’t yet discovered how exactly this works, and how to extract the pagerank out of all the other variables there.
Owners of the these tools, like iWebTool, RustyBrick, Raketforskning, Futurerank and Seotime should really work to find a better way of cracking the pagerank prediction mistery, which has eluded us all. YET.

Only Google knows your PR guys.

Jakarta theme IE rendering problem fix

Well, it wasn’t quite a bug, but so many people complained about my WordPress blog being HARD to read (because Internet Explorer rendered a silly shadow effect/filter wrong, in the stylesheet of the Jakarta theme) that i had to do something.

I also found several other people had problems or at least one problem with this Jakarta theme, over at Scarlet Blaze (the one who created the Jakarta theme) or at WordPress support pages.

Some blog directories i submitted to, told me they can’t approve my blog (i was amazed and happy to see such dedication, so i thank them for their quality coeficient) because the site crashed their PC :

Your blog was declined for the following reason: Sorry, your blog crashes my computer everytime.

So seeing lots of professionals use IE too (i stopped using Internet Explorer for 3 years now) here is the little IE fix for the Jakarta WordPress theme :

In the CSS stylesheet (found in /wp-content/themes/jakarta/style.css), find :

BODY {
FONT-SIZE: 62.5%;
COLOR: #867663;
FONT-FAMILY: Georgia, Verdana, “times New Roman”, Times, Serif;
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #DABB82;
MARGIN: 25px;
filter: Shadow(color:gray, strength:10, direction:135);
}

and remove :

filter: Shadow(color:gray, strength:10, direction:135);

from those Body properties.

Now the template should render very fast, as fast as in Firefox actually. The only drawback is that you don’t have that border effect in IE, in the right part of the theme.

Now go and browse (with Internet Explorer) the initial and original template, and the modified template in my blog. A rendering change right ? ;)

Later edit : one more usefull thing about the Jakarta theme. For all you out there using it, if you want a little more fine blockquote graphic, use this one, that i modified for my blog. It’s not so huge :)

Insoft.ro banned from Google

The online IT&C store, Insoft, was recently banned from Google. See it (or not) here.

This could be because they recently (2-3 months ago) purchased site-wide text links all over Softpedia, Kappa, Acasa, Legaturi and other huge romanian or international portals.

It seems that the recent SEO spam filters, which Google is applying to non-english websites, are prooving to be effective as Matt Cuts states here and here.

Users who find themselves banned from Google, can always fill in a reinclusion request form.

Edit 02.02.2006: It seems to me that they recently (as shown in this Google Groups discussion ) duplicated their whole notebook category and sub-categories, in a 100% similar category, by replacing only the word “notebook” with the word “laptop”, in the new laptop category. This too might be one of the reasons for their website banning.

As always, i really want to warn the owners of the websites that currently have site-wide links towards the online store Insoft, about removing their links. Websites that link to other penalised/banned websites, can at their own turn, be penalised or banned.

As for the theory that “someone who hates me, banned my site somehow” , here is the answer from Google Webmaster Facts :

  • Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site’s ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google’s index.
  • Fact: There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design.

If I find more, i’ll post it here.

Search results updated on all Bigdaddy DC’s

As i said in this post at Digital Point, all Bigdaddy DC’s are starting to show new results. Old sites of people who had them penalised while Jagger hit, are now regaining their initial positions, or even beter.

The Bigdaddy DC’s are :

Or you can check all three of them simultaniously, by using Tony’s BigDaddy Datacenter Watch Tool.

More-over, up until now, my SEO Directory was some how penalised for something (YES, this website was in DP Ad-Network, before Jagger hit) and it never had more than 5 indexed pages, altough months have passed since his creation, and altough it has thousands of IBLs from PR5 websites.

Well, not it has 90+ pages, all with descriptions and titles, and all is OK.

Another example is my former employer’s website, which i worked on for almoust 1,5 years, which had been very badly struck by Jagger. I lost back then, 95% of all positions (very very competitive #1 positions, in searches of hundreds of milions of pages).

Up until today, the website was exactly in the same phase as one day after Jagger Hit. Well, now ALL the positions i had before Jagger, are back. Positions like :

and many, many others.

After the Jagger penalisation, for the terms above, this website was nowhere to be found. By nowhere i mean not in the first 300 positions. But as I remember, i tried dozens of tools, to even find the website in the first 900. So the website was practically non-existant in Google.

Two of my other websites that got struck by Jagger, a long time ago, are also back on tracks.

This update, came with a new (and very important) other suprise. Another 3 websites i was working on, Server Hosting, Reseller Hosting, and Gazduire ETP, have reached astronomic positions, from nowhere (I did work hard on them, after i took them in my grasps) :

Reseller hosting (#14 out of 82.300.000 results)

Server hosting (#41 out of 338.000.000 results)

Hosting (#11 out of 803.000.000 results) (sweet Gesus mother of GOD)

I’ll let you know more as they come.

Edit: As of 03.00 AM, 04.02.2006, it seems that the results from the Bigdaddy datacenters, have passed on to some of the other DC’s, so you might see the new results, in your average Google .

Pagerank prediction tool test

Well.. I have to do this too. Everybody in DP and SeoPedia keeps bugging me about these Pagerank prediction tools.

I decided to take on the iWebTool, RustyBrick, Raketforskning, Futurerank and Seotime Pagerank Prediction Tools . Now i always thought the Rustybrick tool as being a toy. It regularly gives PR10 predictions for numerous websites (which is rather weird and totally not possible). With the newly emerged iWebTool, things might change (as far as i can see they use a fairly organic prediction method, using own internal Google PR calculation schemes).

And from what i noticed (i am pretty sure about this) the last 4 tools (all except Rustybrick) use the same method for the PR prediction. Just that Futurerank actually shows you predictions for each of the cheked DC’s, while Seotime, Rakerforskning and iWebTool automatically choose the highest prediction from all the DC’s.

I still think Rustybrick is the most deceptive of them all, showing really impossible results. The others are at least “human”.

Results for a lot of 10 websites i own/administrate or had/have contact with:

Current Google Toolbar Pagerank for the test websites :

http://www.xperts.ro – PR 5/10
http://www.webxperience.org – PR 5/10
http://www.lamit.ro – PR 5/10
http://www.seo-xperts.com – PR 4/10
http://www.seopedia.org – PR 0/10
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – PR 0/10
http://www.bullguard.com – PR 7/10
http://www.teste-seo.ro – PR 0/10
http://directory.xperts.ro – PR 4/10
http://forum.xperts.ro – PR 4/10

iWebTool Google Pagerank Prediction Tool :

http://www.xperts.ro – Pagerank Prediction 6/10
http://www.webxperience.org – Pagerank Prediction 6/10
http://www.lamit.ro – Pagerank Prediction 6/10
http://www.seo-xperts.com – Pagerank Prediction 5/10
http://www.seopedia.org – Pagerank Prediction 5/10
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – Pagerank Prediction 5/10
http://www.bullguard.com – Pagerank Prediction 7/10
http://www.teste-seo.ro – Pagerank Prediction 3/10
http://directory.xperts.ro – Pagerank Prediction unknown
http://forum.xperts.ro – Pagerank Prediction 5/10

RustyBrick Google Pagerank Prediction Tool :

http://www.xperts.ro – Pagerank Prediction 5/10
http://www.webxperience.org – Pagerank Prediction 10/10
http://www.lamit.ro – Pagerank Prediction 10/10
http://www.seo-xperts.com – Pagerank Prediction 4/10
http://www.seopedia.org – Pagerank Prediction 0/10
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – Pagerank Prediction 0/10
http://www.bullguard.com – Pagerank Prediction 7/10
http://www.teste-seo.ro – Pagerank Prediction 0/10
http://directory.xperts.ro – Pagerank Prediction 4/10
http://forum.xperts.ro – Pagerank Prediction 4/10

Raketforskning Live Pagerank Tool (thanks to Martin from Raketforskning who informed me about his tool):

http://www.xperts.ro – Live Pagerank 5/10
http://www.webxperience.org – Live Pagerank 4/10
http://www.lamit.ro – Live Pagerank 5/10
http://www.seo-xperts.com – Live Pagerank unknown
http://www.seopedia.org – Live Pagerank 5/10
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – Live Pagerank 4/10
http://www.bullguard.com – Live Pagerank 7/10
http://www.teste-seo.ro – Live Pagerank 3/10
http://directory.xperts.ro – Live Pagerank 4/10
http://forum.xperts.ro – Live Pagerank 4/10

Futurerank, future PR prediction tool (I noted the highest and the lowest assumption, as this tool searches and provides results for several datacenters):

http://www.xperts.ro – Future rank : Lowest 3 ; Highest 6
http://www.webxperience.org – Future rank : Lowest 4 ; Highest 6
http://www.lamit.ro – Future rank : Lowest 2 ; Highest 6
http://www.seo-xperts.com – Future rank : Lowest 3 ; Highest 3
http://www.seopedia.org – Future rank : Lowest 2 ; Highest 5
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – Future rank : Lowest 3 ; Highest 4
http://www.bullguard.com – Future rank : Lowest 7 ; Highest 7
http://www.teste-seo.ro – Future rank : Lowest 0 ; Highest 4
http://directory.xperts.ro – Future rank : Lowest 4 ; Highest 5
http://forum.xperts.ro – Future rank : Lowest 4 ; Highest 5

Seotime Google Pagerank Prediction tool :

http://www.xperts.ro – Predicted Pagerank 6/10
http://www.webxperience.org – Predicted Pagerank 6/10
http://www.lamit.ro – Predicted Pagerank 6/10
http://www.seo-xperts.com – Predicted Pagerank 5/10
http://www.seopedia.org – Predicted Pagerank 5/10
http://www.fight-plagiarism.org – Predicted Pagerank unknown
http://www.bullguard.com – Predicted Pagerank 7/10
http://www.teste-seo.ro – Predicted Pagerank 3/10
http://directory.xperts.ro – Predicted Pagerank unknown
http://forum.xperts.ro – Predicted Pagerank unknown

There is another pagerank prediction tool, proudly found and researched by Roman1 over at Digital Point forums, based on Dmoz as well as the Google Directory (the website must be in DMOZ for this “prediction tool” to be viable) and Digitalpoint members have all been trying to figure it out. Since all my websites or the websites i have in DMOZ are either not calculable trough this method, or don’t have enough sorrounding category websites to achive the prediction, i can’t say my thing. I’ll watch the outcome though.

Ah… I never trusted such tools, but all that remains to me now, with just days, or weeks before this PR update, is to wait and see the results.

I’ll publish them here.