Search Engines

1/17/2008

• Suspended From Google Adwords

  I’m writing this blog as a warning to everyone using Google Adwords.
  The people who “run” adwords are Nazis with no feeling for human beings. If you make a mistake, there is no warning system and no appeals process.
  3 weeks ago I set up a campaign promoting a page on my blog in Adwords.
  When [...]

8/24/2007

• Google Banning Adwords Advertisers

  This morning I had an interesting email conversation with a subscriber of mine who just got banned from Adwords for promoting software that makes MFA (made for adsense) sites.
  Yes, banned from Adwords, not adsense.
  Here’s what happened:
  He is a beginning affiliate. He just promotes other people’s stuff through adwords. Obviously not google’s favorite person, [...]

12/7/2006

• Processing Credit Cards for Free

  If you are selling stuff online, and it doesn’t involve a subscription product, you’re CRAZY not to use Google Checkout
  Yesterday I got a phone call from my friend Lanny Morton because he was quoted in a story on the front page of the money section of the USA today (I know…he doesn’t really blog…I’ve [...]

10/25/2006

• Yahoo Has Major Issues

  Since Yahoo sent out the email telling everyone how they’re upgrading search marketing accounts, I thought I’d look into it.
  Holy cow do they have issues.
  First, I was looking at their API. They have all the documentation for their searchmarketing api online, but it doesn’t work. It’s not active for people. There’s a [...]

• Google Website Optimizer – Does this fit their mission?

  Google recently announced the release of their website optimizer, which I heard about from googleicious.
  Now, this tool looks like it will be cool and all, but I don’t see how it fits their mission statement:

  Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

  How does this tool help them to [...]

8/1/2006

• Google Video and Porn

  Earlier today Chris emailed me a link to a Matt Cutts blog post with links to video seo answers that Matt did.
  The answers themselves were normal.
  “blah blah, blah blah, blah blah, nothing you haven’t heard before”
  What really got me was when I was looking around the page I was on.
  See, I have never gotten [...]

4/17/2006

• Aaron Wall SEObook Review

  I was out to lunch the other day with Jordy the other day and he asked me what I read about SEO that he could read too.
  I told him that I normally don’t read anything, because there’s so much garbage out there that it’s a giant waste of time.
  I still think reading most [...]

2/15/2006

• The parts are better than the whole (seo)

  I’ve learned over the past few years that the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole in SEO.
  What I mean is that being #1 for all the related search terms is usually better than being #1 for the main keyword.
  Take utah real estate for example.
  You get much better traffic if [...]

2/12/2006

• Maybe Yahoo Actually Listens!

  This was in my referer logs today:
  twiki.corp.yahoo.com/view/Overture/WhatTheWorldThinksOfYPN
  You can’t connect to it of course, because its an internal yahoo page.
  It looks like yahoo actually cares what other people think (unlike the other giant corporate search engine leader), and they’re keeping up on it. Maybe now they’ll actually do something about it.
  Here’s to rooting.
  GO YAHOO!!!
  GO YPN!!!

2/5/2006

• Google AdWords Abuses

  I’ll admit, I’ve only slightly used adwords. All of my adwords campaigns are run and managed by someone else who has gotten pretty good at it.
  However, someone else I know who is running multiple adwords campaigns emailed me yesterday with the following:

  Google is messing with me again. Only one week after they finally got [...]

2/2/2006

• Yahoo Missing the Boat

  For the past few months I’ve been getting a phone call from YPN about once a month because they’re looking for feedback. They want to know what’s going on with YPN from the publishers point of view (which is a whole heck of a lot more than I can say for adsense).
  Every [...]

1/31/2006

• Google finally indexing WritingUp.com

  Number of pages indexed (as of this writing it’s 13,200).
  It even got a pr3.
  Funny how far behind they have been with this. I mean, the number of incoming links according to MSN right now is over 12,000. That’s been a pretty steady growth over the past 4 months. Nothing un-natural done. [...]

1/27/2006

• Adsense Re-instating Accounts

  lol.
  This is unbelievable. If you’ve had your adsense account banned, it looks like there might be a glimmer of hope for you…but you have to be persistent.
  In the past 2 weeks I know of 2 adsense accounts that have been re-instated. However, I had to appeal for both of those people. One [...]

1/20/2006

• Google downfall

  I’m telling you…the downfall of google is going to happen.
  Google isn’t the small company it used to be. They’re becoming more and more like microsoft every day. It’s happening. Mark my words!

1/16/2006

• Contacting Adsense

  This has gotten pretty frustrating.  I’ve tried to contact adsense quite a few times and in the typical Google fashion, NOTHING.
  They don’t respond, they don’t acknowledge, they’re not interested…
  I’m wondering if anyone knows someone who works at google in the adsense department?  Any chance that I might get their contact info?
  I’d just really like to [...]

12/28/2005

• Another Adsense Account Banned

  Boy, this is getting tiresome.
  I got another email from someone I know today telling me that google has shut down their adsense account. That’s about the 6th one in the last month.
  So why all of a sudden is click fraud such a major concern of google’s?
  Why wasn’t it a major concern a [...]

12/27/2005

• Something is screwed up at Google

  So watch this:
  Number of pages indexed in Yahoo
  Number of pages indexed in MSN
  What happened here?
  NO pages in Google!
  Well, I’ll tell you what didn’t happen. It didn’t happen that the site is brand new and doesn’t have any inbound links:
  Number of backlinks in MSN
  (the reason I show msn is because they show true numbers. [...]

12/14/2005

• YPN phone call

  I just got a call from the good folks at publisher.yahoo.com, wanting feedback on YPN.
  I gave them feedback.
  I told them it stinks and that I’ve been very disappointed with it.
  I also volunteered to do whatever I could to help them improve it so that I can get adsense off my pages. [...]

• Google Christmas Gift

  I got 2 christmas gifts from Google in the mail this morning (I have 2 different adsense accounts):

  laptop mouse
  128 MB pen drive
  4 port usb hub
  flexible laptop keyboard light
  collapsable usb cord
  collapsable computer headset
  keychane and wrist strap for the pen drive
  batteries for the mouse
  velvet carrying case

  Pretty nice.
  I’m still upset with them for screwing so many people…

12/13/2005

• To link, or not to link…

  The very fact that we’re having this discussion points out 2 problems to me.
  1. Are search algorighms so easy to manipulate that we really need to be careful with what we do on our websites, for fear of offending some search God? Don’t you think that google or yahoo has the ability to monitor [...]