A couple of days ago I noticed that the normal little yellow dude Google has for the Street View is now a leprechaun for St. Patrick’s Day. Very cute.

According to Wikipedia:

In Irish mythology, a leprechaun (Irish: leipreachán) is a type of male faerie said to inhabit the island of Ireland. They are a class of “faerie folk” associated in Irish mythology and folklore, as with all faeries, with the Tuatha Dé Danann and other quasi-historical peoples said to have inhabited Ireland before the arrival of the Celts.

Do you think this will increase CTR? People love to interact with websites, and I think people would click out of curiosity. However, I also think this will draw attention away from the ad itself.

From an AdSense rep:

Unfortunately, as you suspected, the ******.info domain was
previously found to be in violation of our program policies and is no
longer eligible for participation in the AdSense program.

Should have checked before registering, but at least it was a .info domain and only cost me $3 instead of an $8 .com.

I asked for an exception since I’m a new owner and have nothing to do with the previous violations:

I apologize for the inconvenience. However, as was previously mentioned, since the site was found to be in violation of our program policies, it is no longer eligible for participation in AdSense.

You are welcome to place Google ads on other sites which comply with
AdSense policies.

Drat. Oh well, looks like I’m just putting YPN on this one.

The speculation as to why the sites were “dinged” is all over the board, and we don’t know that it’s for the above reasons. However, this point still remains:

One of Google’s main problems is that they’re artificially manipulating results. This is ridiculous. For example, let’s say you’re looking for JohnChow.com but are for some reason searching on Google. If you type in “John Chow” the first result is some lame review of JohnChow.com, not the actual website. You won’t even find it on the first few pages! Are you freaking kidding me? If somebody is searching for John Chow, they obviously want the John Chow home page, and Google doesn’t give it to them. Google used to rant on about how the user experience is #1, but that is clearly just bullshit to make themselves sound better. Artificially manipulating results like this degrades the user experience, and it’s all because they want to whine about paid links? I used to be a raving Google fan, but not nearly as much anymore.

Google has pissed off most of the blogosphere by dropping PageRank of many of the blogs on the internet. Some say it’s because they were selling links, some say they were network inter-linking, and there were plenty of other guesses, but the truth is, nobody knows for sure. Regardless, PageRank has all but completely lost it’s value.

What are we to do? I say we stop conforming to what Google tells us to do and take a first step by removing all ‘nofollow’ tags from our links. This was Google’s method of scaring us by telling us we had to add this tag to all paid links and all comments, and all sites not vouched for, blahblahblah. Screw it. Removing this tag could alter Google’s search results in a negative way, perhaps reminding Google not to bite the hand that feeds them (webmasters.)

Is Google on a decline? Perhaps, I’ve noticed their search results are nowhere close to as good as they used to be, and Yahoo and MSN have really gained some market share in search.

If Google keeps this crap up, they’re going to kill themselves, plain and simple. Webmasters keep them afloat. Stabbing us in the back like this is going to do nothing but piss us off. Maybe I should stop using AdSense completely. I’ve already started using Yahoo search more, and for the first time, it’s more accurate than Google. Maybe it’s all some sort of master plan? Who knows, but I do know that Google sucks at communication and customer relations. Just let us know what’s going on! What’s so difficult about that?

As long as you get at least $25, you’ll get a check, just like Adsense. I recommend signing up, and if you’re approved, it won’t hurt to go out on a weekend for a day and collect as many business’s information as possible. It would be easy to go out after work for an hour or two and collect a few on your commute back.

Google Local Business Referral Sign-Up

I feel sorry for the businesses in a large city that will have person after person coming by trying to get their info. As far as I know, Google doesn’t provide territory information, but that might change as well.

Google is doing a great job with putting 7 different links in a small 468×60 area without making it look cluttered. I’m curious as to how they’re going to perform, but sadly, we can’t yet create channels for the new format. If anybody has any more information on these new formats, please leave a comment.

Want to jump ahead of the others and see what your Page Rank will be during the upcoming update? Visit PageRank Predictor. It’s a tool by iWebTool.com, which any webmaster or SEO’er should visit frequently.

After running my sites and a few others, I was a little disappointed by the results. I decided to see how accurate it was, so I checked out Google.com and Yahoo.com, both of which have the coveted PageRank 10. To my surprise, these were the results:

Either Google and Yahoo are losing their touch, or something is inaccurate in the PageRank Predictor. I’ll assume the latter. Does this mean all the tests are inaccurate? By no means. Considering the enormous amount of power of Google and Yahoo, it’s probably difficult to assume a Page Rank prediction just from back-links, which I believe is the only thing this tool uses.

In other words, use this tool all you want, but don’t assume it’s right. If you see your predicted page rank as higher than the current rank, it probably will be. If you see it fall, it might. Have you been slacking? The predictor might be right.

Kevin from BloggingTips.com did a few tests of his own and will compare the results to the real update in about a month. We’ll see how accurate this tool really is.

Here is an example of a 468×60 banner with “Very rounded corners:”

If that doesn’t show anything, try refreshing until it does. The ad could look a little bit better, it looks like the leftmost text is running into the border a little bit. It still looks better than the normal square corners, but will it convert better than ads with no border?

I’m going to make 50% of my ads with no border, and 50% with rounded corners and see which one converts better. You should do the same; A/B Testing is one of the best ways to ensure you’re getting the most out of your ad space. I’ll write a comprehensive tutorial on A/B Testing in the future.

You can also vary the amount of roundness of your corners. When you choose your borders, AdSense provides you with a choice of either square corners, slightly rounded corners, and very rounded corners. The code comes out like this:

google_ui_features = “rc:10″; for very rounded corners
google_ui_features = “rc:6″; for slightly rounded corners
google_ui_features = “rc:0″; square corners

From my quick testing, it doesn’t seem like you can edit the number for custom-rounded corners. In other words, you can’t enter “rc:8″ in place of “rc:10″ to get “mostly rounded corners.” If I’m mistaken on this, please let me know, but it didn’t work for me.

source: QuickOnlineTips

Your Google Toolbar may not reflect this yet, and the Search Status plugin doesn’t either. I don’t really know when to expect these to update.

Right now a little less than half of Googles 72 Datacenters are showing my pagerank as 6, but hopefully those will update soon. Check it out here: Rank Alert

I would like to thank all of my readers. I promise I’ll get the theme and functions updated soon!

Google announced today that they will changing the cleverly named Froogle product (a pun on “frugal”) to “Google Product Search,” which is much more clear on what it actually does. I’m kinda disappointed, I always like the “frugal” pun, but apparently it confused people.

What’s next, changing Picasa to “Google Image Editor”? Maybe AdSense could be changed to “Google Make Money Advertising on Your Website.” Anyway, I understand why they did it, but I really liked the name Froogle. Bah.

Update: Now it’s displaying both types of ads; standard and the new type. I guess they’re just testing the new features from Doubleclick.

This isn’t necessarily Google’s fault, but by default, WordPress automatically adds “nofollow” tags to all comment and author links when anybody leaves a comment. This was done to reduce the benefits to comment spammers, but this also stops rewarding legitimate contributers. Plugins such as Akismet and Bad Behavior have all but completely stopped comment spamming for bloggers, so there isn’t as much risk if you leave off the nofollow tag.

I’ve decided to install the Dofollow WordPress Plugin on this blog (and AutomoBlog.net,) because I believe that if someone takes the time out of their day to comment on one of my posts, then they deserve to be rewarded for it by a link back to their site. Obviously if this is going to be abused I’ll have to remove it, but i don’t see any problems in the near future.

Any thoughts?