Google's Expired SSL Certificate

When I went to the AdSense support page today I got a warning popping up about services.google.com being a valid certificate that expired on 3/6/2004 2:53 PM.

Gee Google, I'm sure you have enough money to buy a new SSL cert and not recycle year old expired certs.

Now I can't reproduce it, figures.

Holy Crap, it's WAL-MART!

I'm not sure if AdWords can target specific web pages vs. a whole domain when you site target but it looks like I have a single web page that's being site targetted by Wal-Mart. Whenever you load this page it keeps displaying this large Wal-Mart banner, just unbelievable as demographics for this page appear to be trailer trash!

Track AdSense clicks in Google Analytics

Aaron Wall of SEOBOOK has a cool script posted that will track AdSense clicks from both Internet Explorer and Firefox and report them in Google Analytics. No good deed goes unpunished as everyone immediately started begging for patches to make the script run on YPN.

What's next?

"Aaron, can you make it work with Chitika minimalls?"

Blogs Made For AdSense Hysteria

Well the villagers are up in arms and are heading to Blogger brandishing their pitchforks and torches claiming that Blogger is the root of all MFAs (Made for AdSense) which is some pretty narrow minded hysterical thinking.

The problem isn't Blogger or even that Google has made it easy to incorporate AdSense into your account, the problem is that lazy greedy people will use whatever means possible to get as much money as possible and the Blogger/AdSense combination just happens to be an easy way for the less technical people to access low hanging fruit for FREE.

If AdSense wanted a better reputation they wouldn't permit AdSense ads on any free web service of any sort which tends to attract people looking for webmaster welfare but Google wants just as much money as everyone else so all bets are off.

The premise of the webmaster welfare crowd is to, as Dire Straits put it, "Get your money for nothin’" as they don't believe in paying for a damn thing but expect something for nothing. Thanks to contextual advertising programs like AdSense some of them are being quite successful and that seems to irritate webmasters that actually attempt to provide a valuable service to earn the same money.

Let's face it, there are two approaches to making income with Adsense. The first is hard work to provide a valuable service that pays off in the long run. The second is to use the shotgun approach to blanket the web with little crappy sites designed just to snare clicks on the ads as people scramble to flee the site. While the complaints of the so-called legitimate webmasters can be appreciated there's also the possibility it's sour grapes talking as they didn't think of it first.

To spam or not to spam, to make for AdSense or not to make for AdSense, who cares!

Boys and girls it's a game of economics and if the MFA sites didn't work the advertisers would block the sites, smart pricing would drop their earnings per click to $0.01 each, and Google would ban the sites but that's apparently not happening so the incentive to keep cranking MFA sites is as strong as ever..

Money talks, deal with it.

ThreadWatch SQL Timeout

I've read the rumors about Threadwatch having issues with SQL timeouts but I never saw it happen until today:

Fatal error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query query

I think someone on his shared server is just hogging the CPU as it was getting dog slow before that happened.

Come on Nick, get the heck off that box!

Shoot the Web Designer!

When we were looking for a place to board our cat for a week we thought we'd see if there were any cat only places in our area that didn't have any loud barking dogs which seem to freak out my little siamese. My wife looked all over the internet and couldn't find squat and luckily some kennel she called told us about this place and when we dropped in to check it out they gave us a brochure with their web site address on it.

Not that the site doesn't look nice, it's very nice, unfortunatly very nice looking doesn't help people find the place. If the owner of the place did this then my apologies, but I think he paid someone to put that web site online and they should be ASHAMED of themselves whoever they are. It's all 100% graphics, no text, no meta tags, no search engine placement, NO NOTHING! Not even the damn title of the web site has the location of the business for the search engine so it's just a big pile of pretty graphics that nobody can find unless you already know it exists.

I'm starting to think web designers need to be licensed professionals as sites like this are just criminal to anyone paying hard earned money to promote their business and get a big steaming load of crap for their dollar.

Google Dumped Webmaster World!

Well, at least we now know that Google's serious that if you block them via robots.txt that they will yank your site and every page on it. About 2 million Webmaster World pages went POOF!

The natives are up in arms over no ability to search the site, newbies that just lost their AdSense account don't know how to find WW now and complain they were booted for invalid clicks, the AdSense forum members don't have fodder for their folly, it's a real sad state of affairs.

In the immortal words of REM:
"It's the end of the (webmaster) world as we know it and I feel fine"

Blog of the damned

I've been playing with Blogger for a couple of days just because I'm mobile and bored out of my skull but I don't think this blog in this format will last long as it's lacking a lot of features such as categorization and I'm not sure I can deal with such short comings for long.

Guess I'll just ramble and rant here on the free blog until I can't stand it anymore and set up my own site but procrastination could win in the long run.

We shall see!

Trouble at ThreadWatch

I hope that ThreadWatch will survive these little hiccups and make it to the next level as I too once bridged the gap from shared hosting to dedicated servers and it's definitely a serious resource commitment in both time and money.

Good luck Nick, we're pulling for you!

AdSense Referrals pay WHEN?

Who the heck is actually putting these new AdSense referral buttons on their web site and if so, has anyone actually signed up any webmasters from these buttons?

It seems to me that AdSense saturation is such that almost any webmaster that would be interested in AdSense already knows about it and probably already has it on their web site.

Besides, why in the hell would I want to tell my competitors to sign up with AdSense and help dilute my revenue? Simple economics dictates ad inventory surplus will result in lower payouts, and Google wants me to help them send my own income spiralling into the crapper .

Now what we'd be interested in is a referral fee for signing up NEW ADWORDS ADVERTISERS which would help increase the number of people bidding on the existing ad space, what a concept!

Next, let's explore when and or *IF* you'll ever get paid as your $100 bounty is only due and payable when the referred publisher is eligible for their first $100 payment which, from what I've read by many of the little site webmasters, could take 3-6 months.

Wow, now there's a real incentive Google, I'll rush right out and tack one of these buttons on my web site ASAP!

Not.

AdSense Onsite Advertiser Sign-up Fiasco

Wouldn't you think that Google would plan what they add to their AdSense program so that the new features even make sense?

Nah, that would be too easy.

The new feature in AdSense puts "Advertise on this site" in the ad units so that advertisers can supposedly easily sign up to site target ads on your web site. Well, this would be nice and all assuming you only have one web site as Google only gives you one landing page. This means people with multiple sites already have a dilemma when someone signs up to advertise seeing a common landing page.

How about letting publishers authorize who or what is advertised on their site via site targetting? Oh hell no, you get whatever crap the advertiser decides to inflict directly on your web site as long as they bid enough.

Reporting?

Nope.

No way to see how much site targetting ads pay vs regular site content ads, it would make too much sense.

How about a referral fee for signing up new advertisers?

Nope.

They'll pay you for referring new competitors to steal your ad money but forget new advertisers that fuel the whole system, you get paid then they advertise on your site.

I immediately opted out of Onsite Advertiser Sign-up for many reasons, some listed above, and the fact that I already have direct advertisers on my site and don't need Google pilfering my extra revenue anymore than they already do.

I'm sure some bleating AdSense sheep will leave this option enabled but the negatives on this outweigh the positives and I'll wait for a new and improved version to surface if it ever does.

AdWords Site Targetting - Good, Bad and Ugly for AdSense

Ever since AdWords introduced Site Targetting it seems to have a negative impact on AdSense web sites income from those of use fortunate enough to have been targetted. I've pointed out this issue a few times but Google tech support swears it brings in more income and it's a crock, a huge crock, and I have historical income data that backs up my theory on this topic.

The original premise of the AdWords content network (aka AdSense) was that Google supposedly tested ads on Google Search first to see how well the ads performed before releasing them onto the content network. This was good for publishers as supposedly only the ads that got the best click thru rates were on our web sites. Now with the advent of Site Targetting an AdWords advertiser can directly place an advertisement on our web site no matter how well it performs and the AdSense team claims it's more income because "they have to bid competitively to place the ad".

OK, let's get this clear, someone could site target my web site with an ad that says:

"THIS SITE SUCKS, DON'T CLICK THE ADS
http://www.thissitebites.com"

but because they bid competitively on that ad to get placement I'm supposedly making more money although nobody actually clicks on the ad.

Riiiiiiiight.

And I thought Google had a zero tolerance drug policy...

Robots Blocked?

I'm not sure what Brett's up to on WebmasterWorld but his new robots.txt file blocks all robots including Google so now you can't even search WebmasterWorld unless you want to resort to using Yahoo. He claims he's trying to stop rogue bots but that's fairly easy to do unless they're using a series of random URLs which is very rare.

I'm not sure what's going on but we'll be keeping an eye on this fiasco as it progresses.

What's your web site?

Everyone always asks that same old question "what's your web site" so I decided to put up this blog just to give us a place to chit chat about technical issues.

To be honest, by disclosing my site I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing a lot of information about how I've done things as my competitors could easily learn way too much by reading my posts on various webmaster forums, examining what I've done on my sites, and duplicating it and put me out of business so I just keep the URLs mum.

So here's a nice anonymous blog where we can chat.

Enjoy.

- Bill