Reaper-X .:[ ID ]:. » Google

Google slow to load …

Reaper-X — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:25:13 +0000

Just when i thought i’m the only person who’s experiencing this problem, someone create a new thread over at Digital Point forums saying that he’s also experiencing slow loading problem when accessing various Google services such as Adsense, GMail, Adwords or the Google Search itself

All the Google features such as GMail, Adwords, Adsense, and just plain old Google Search have been lagging a little more than usual for me. Google has something going on. I think soon Google will surprise us with a bunch of new features. Just be patient all you PR fanatics! Can you say algorythm update!

With the exception that i don’t think there’s PR Update going on … i just think that there’re some network issues somewhere. Other than that i also noticed a slow loading time when accessing my adsense account page or searching the web using Google although i don’t really have problem with the GMail or Adwords simply because i don’t use it (well i'm using Google hosted email and using POP3 to retrieve all emails)

I don’t know if it’s just me or does anyone else who visited this site also experience delay especially at the Javascript part which is comes from the Google CSE, but recently i’ve been thinking on moving the Javascript over to this site … but i’m not sure whether if it’s going to break Google rules or not (i know that this vps is nothing compared to the Google server, but it just bothering me because whenever i try to access this site, i always see some delay when loading the Google CSE Javascript code)

Forum Discussion over at DigitalPoint

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Journal, Personal

No More Supplemental Results Label from Google ?

Reaper-X — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:11:22 +0000

I just found out about this today from the Official Google Webmaster Blog :

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we've been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we've decided to stop labeling these URLs as "Supplemental Results." Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google's supplemental index being deeper and fresher.

At first i thought i was having a big success on getting out some of my pages from the Google Supplemental Index, but I guess that’s explain why i didn’t see supplemental results label on when querying this site using Google since a few days ago (or perhaps more thought i can’t remember exactly)

In my opinion, it’d be more useful if Google keep displaying the supplemental results label because it really help the webmaster to improve their site even more, but that’s just my opinion …

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, SEO

Google Adsense has new beta referrals program

Reaper-X — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 17:08:45 +0000

Most of you already know about adsense which is based on pay-per-click, but now Google Adsense add new referrals program for the adsense publisher which is based on pay-per-action program. Here’s the short description about this new Google Referrals program from the Google Adsense blog :

As with our current Google referrals, you'll generate earnings when your visitors click through to an advertiser's site and complete an action defined by your advertisers, such as a sale or sign-up. Because these actions are often more involved than a simple click or impression, advertisers pay more for these referrals, which can translate into higher earnings for your site

As you can see that this new program is just like the old pay-per-click type, with an addition that your site visitors must complete an action defined by the advertisers first

Unfortunately this beta program only open for specific publishers only (i'm pretty sure that most of the new publishers that is getting accepted with this beta program are large publishers only / or those who’s having large site)

But just in case you’re interested on trying the new referrals beta program, you can sign up from here

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Adsense, Income Sources, Making Money, Tech News

Is it necessary to use Adsense click tracking program ?

Reaper-X — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:28:29 +0000

I think most of you have already heard about various site which is using adsense as their monetization source getting banned from Google adsense because Google suspect them of click fraud activity even though they’ve done nothing wrong although only God knows who’s telling the truth. And because of it, there are various site that’s offering service to track your adsense click, or if you really care about privacy or dont want to share your adsense click info, you can also use open source adsense tracking program called Adlogger

But is it necessary for you to use those services or using various adsense tracker script out there ? if it’s for .. the short answer would be .. no, it’s not necessary to use click tracking software or services for adsense. But why ?

If you’re installing the adlogger to track your adsense clicks :

It’s not accurate even if you use Google Analytics to track your adsense click with the help of a javascript. It’s not going to report the actual stats, and only Google know about your detailed adsense statistic even for the click fraud activity if there’s any

Why it’s not accurate ?

There are various forum topic about this, and here’s what they said about adlogger :

From Webmaster World – 16 February 2007 :

Adlogger is kinda useless. First in firefox if you go over the ads it count 1 click. Also its no very compitable with ie7 and hundreds of other bugs
In firefox a "hover" counts a click

From DigitalPoint Forums – 11 March 2007 :

Adloger is worthless...i wouldnt bother with it. It doesn't track clicks it tracks mouse position over your adsense code

And the conclusion is adlogger also counts mouse hover a click. But don’t get me wrong, adlogger can be useful for you especially if you want to block specific ads from appearing on your site by adding the url that’s displayed on your adlogger statistic into your Google Adsense account under Competitive Filter List. And this could be useful to block those MFA (Made for Adsense) site

The alternative way to automatically generate various MFA site for you to use by one click is by using AdsBlackList

What about various 3rd party site that’s offering to track your adsense clicks ?

Although i’ve never used 3rd party click tracking service for my adsense ads, personally i do not recommend you to use them. Because if you use it, they can also track which keyword is best on your site. And in the end you just help them to make more money. So in this case i’d suggest you to use adlogger instead. But this is just from my own opinion

Is there any good adsense click tracker script out there ?

I do not know much about this, but from my point of view there’s no need to really track your adsense ads. Just leave it to Google (trust them in this case), beside there’s nothing you can do if you’re clicking on your adsense ads and got banned from Google Adsense or violating adsense guidelines .. and you might also interested on reading this topic from Webmaster World about click fraud

Other than that you also might be interested on reading this topic from Google adsense Help Center

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Adsense, Income Sources, Making Money, Opinion

Korean Website sues Google because of Click Fraud

Reaper-X — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 10:52:04 +0000

It seems the click fraud activity still exists but the question is .. who’s telling the truth ? is it Google or the suspected website (The Local Humor Website) ?

Google, the U.S. web search giant, faces a W30 million (US$1=W945) lawsuit in Korea. Humor University, a local humor website, announced on Sunday that it filed a suit against Google demanding W20 million in payments and W10 million in damages. Humor University said the American firm allegedly failed to pay for three months of online ads

Humor University said that it signed an agreement to host Google's Adsense ads and ran them for three months in late 2005, but Google refused to pay, citing click fraud. Humor University said Google never provided evidence to back up those claims – Full Story

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Adsense, Internet, Tech News

Google Webmaster Tools Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases

Reaper-X — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:58:19 +0000

Yesterday Vanessa Fox of Google announced that Google Webmaster Tools now reporting the anchor phrase used on various site that link to your site and this is really important for seo. Here’s what Danny Sullivan (the GodFather of search engine) said about this :

How They Link, Not How Many Links, Influences Ranking

As you can see, the data is great information. The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors -- often the most important factor -- for how you will rank in Google.

Let me repeat that. The anchor text used to link to your pages often is the most important reason you'll rank well for particular words.

And what about this site ? what is the most used phrases that link to this site ?

Unfortunately .. the most used phrases that goes to this site are only .. Reaper X, Reaper X ID, and Reaper X ID Reborn :( (test) and that’s why i ranked really well using that words but .. i'm sure no one are going to use that keywords when searching

So if you’re interested on linking to this site .. maybe you could use some other anchor text instead ? :P

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Internet, SEO, Webmaster Tools, Website

Sayonara .. Google Translation

Reaper-X — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:46:20 +0000

It’s been a while since the first time i used the Google translation service to automatically translate this blog into other language. But now .. after upgrading into Wordpress 2.1.3 RC-1 .. i find that the famous Global Translation plugin from Nothing2Hide is no longer worked as it should because it always want to automatically translate the blog base url using the Google translation tool

Other than that before upgrading into the Wordpress 2.1.3 the translation tool also did not work because it always gives me 403 forbidden error message from Google (yup .. google ban automatic use of their translation service via scripting, etc especially if you have lots of pages and are frequently accessed .. and Googlebot or other search engine bot access also counted)

But if you’re sure that you do not have a lot of pages on your site, then you do not have to worry about your server ip address getting banned from the Google Translation service because of it

As a side note, i also used the Google Automatic URL removal to remove the indexed translation page as soon as possible .. so there won’t be any visitors getting lots of 404 error messages when they came from search engine (but so far there’s no one came to this site from the translated address of this blog)

Now the only thing left for me is .. well .. fill the top bar previously used by the translation images into something else :D

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Journal, Personal, Website, Wordpress

Okay, that’s it .. im leaving Adsense

Reaper-X — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:12:55 +0000

Sorry if the title misleading, but i had enough of seeing various forums talk about how they say that adsense is not working for them or they can only make small amount of money from using adsense and decided to switch into other advertising network or method

And not that because i love adsense to death, but simply those who think adsense sucks, does not really know what they’re talking about. And so that’s why i decided to write this (other than that, you might be interested on reading my previous post about what i have learned from adsense)

Why did i say that ? first of all .. if someone say adsense is not working as it should on their website should at least know how to count unique visitors for their site, if their site can only bring 100 – 300 unique visitors per day .. then you should try to improve your website traffic instead of complaining about adsense

What if they say, they get lots of clicks but those clicks only worth $0.xx or almost next to nothing ? .. wow that’s good if you can get high CTR on your site there are possibility :

You’re using bad niche on your website
Because the adsense bot couldnt find useful keywords on your page, they decided to display Public service ads (PSA) that does not give you money even if there’s someone clicking on it

And now what if your site is getting huge amount of visitors daily but making low click through rate ? .. if this the case, then maybe you should play around with your adsense placement

So what’s the conclusion from this post ? simple, if you really want to make sure adsense is best for your site. Keep on increasing your site visitors to more than 1000 unique per day and see how adsense is performing on your site. And if you get low CTR try playing around with the adsense placement and see the results after one month. If its still not working as it should, then you can switch into other advertising network

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Adsense, Income Sources, Making Money, Opinion

Block search results on your site from being Indexed by Google

Reaper-X — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:37:01 +0000

Wow .. i just read this today regarding the search results getting indexed by search engine (in this case Google), because now Google gives you a warning about making your search results page from getting indexed by Googlebot

Here’s what Vanessa Fox from Google said about this – link :

Typically, web search results don't add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index. (Not all URLs that contains things like "/results" or "/search" are search results, of course.)

Other than that, Matt Cutts also suggest you to use robots.txt to block search engine from indexing your search results, and here’s what he said about this :

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines

And because of this issue, Google also updated their quality guidelines page

Thanks to Danny Sullivan for posting about this matter, because i’ll never know about this issue if he’s not posting it on his blog

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Google, SEO, Website

Between using Subdomain and Subdirectory

Reaper-X — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 07:21:13 +0000

Recently i’ve seen various people asking at various webmasters forum out there, whether they should use a subdomain or subdirectory for their own site. And i asked myself, why they should be confused between choosing subdomain or subdirectory ? because like most of you already know that subdomain is just a subdirectory in your site. With the exception that search engine think that your subdomain is a separate site. And that means Google PR on your main domain and on your subdomain would be different

And to make things clear for you, here’s an example from my site. If you type this on your browser address bar : http://www.reaper-x.com/forums you’ll get redirected automatically to http://forums.reaper-x.com. And as you can see from that example, basically my forums is located under subdirectory of this site, but because i prefer Google or anyother search engine to display it as http://forums.reaper-x.com i'm using a permanent redirect using modrewrite and if Google decided to give PR to my forums in the future, all PR goes automatically to the forums.reaper-x.com

But what if i'm using http://www.reaper-x.com/forums instead of using subdomain ? of course the Google juice from this site are going to be passed easily because Google considered it’s as a subdirectory, which means you do not have to wait longer to get pr into your new forums

Although that is depend on your point of view, if it’s for me i prefer to use subdomain rather than using subdirectory because subdomain looks more professional to me and you can manage subdomain easily because everything inside that subdomain is considered to be in the root directory :) .. although it’ll really take sometime before your new subdomain get the Google Juice .. but that’s just my own opinion of course :)

As an addition, if you’re interested on using modrewrite on your subdomain or add-on domain, you might take a look at my previous post about using modrewrite on addon domain / subdomain

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Page Rank, Google Pagerank, SEO, Website

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Wordpress

Reaper-X — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 12:03:49 +0000

Well .. let’s say you’re using wordpress to power your website. And what should be done next to make sure your website is ready to be crawled by search engine ? Here’s the answer on what should be done after installing wordpress to your web server, and it’s called SEO / Search Engine Optimization

As a side note, this should be done before you go submitting your site to various directories, doing some link exchange, or to various search engine itself to make sure they’re not indexing your unfinished website :)

1. Choose Whether you want to use WWW in your domain or not

This is the most important thing to do, so this come first before anything else. This is done because having one canonical url version for all of your page will help you improve your search engine ranking

And here’s what Matt Cutts said about this :

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

And now how to use it on your blog ? Well .. you can read my previous article on how to force www on domain name. And if you don’t like WWW in front of your domain, with a slight modification you can also force the non-www version on all of your webpages

If you’re using add-on domain, you might take a look on my previous post on how to configure add-on domain so it’ll looks like a single domain placed on a single server

2. Control how Search Engine Robot visit your site

The next step would be creating robots.txt file and placed / upload it to the root folder of your site. This is done to control how search engine crawling your page, so they do not index your secret page

Read here for more info about this or here. And if you need real world example about this, you can click here (Google Results) for robots.txt example from various live sites

As a note, there are different opinion on whether you should let Google or other search engine bot to index your /feed/ address, archives page, etc or not. Personally i’ve tried them both and i don’t find any differences (in traffic, because of Google putting my site into it is supplemental index) between blocking them or not

If you want to read more about this issue, you can read Aaron Wall from Seobook post about this Google Supplemental Index Issue

3. Change your Permalink Structure / Using Nice URL

In order to change it, just go to Options -> Permalink from your dashboard and choose the Date and Name Based Permalink. So your url will looks like this for an example :

Default URL Structure : http://www.example.com/?p=123
Optimized URL Structure : http://www.example.com/category/post-name/

If you need more information about Permalink Structure in Wordpress, you can read it from here

4. Use unique title and meta description for each page

I know that inserting each meta description to a custom field (as for title, im sure no one are using the same title every time) for every page is time consuming especially to those who’s moving from the free wordpress.com blog

Fortunately there’s one plugin for wordpress that can help you with this situation, and it’s called Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo (if i'm not wrong, because i couldnt find his about page) :P which will automatically create Meta Description tag for your wordpress blog

And now the next step to do is optimize your blog post title by installing another plugin, and this one called Optimal Title created by Elasticdog that can be found here

5. Create Sitemaps for your Wordpress Blog

Creating sitemap is necessary especially if you want Search Engine to index your pages properly (deep linking). And in order to simplify creating sitemap for your site, you can use the Wordpress Sitemap Plugins which can be downloaded from here

That’s all about it, as an addition you might be interested on reading my previous post about DIY SEO

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Google, Google Sitemaps, Guide, SEO, Tutorials, Website

403 Forbidden from Google ?

Reaper-X — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 06:00:57 +0000

I just found this today, that the translation button on this page .. can not be used anymore and that’s why i decided to remove it :(

I do not know the reason why the Google translation service reject request from this site, because previously it just works fine without problem .. but now ? i always get this message no matter which translation button i press .. and it shows the same message too eventhough i'm using proxy to connect to my host

We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

Now .. i'm sure that my site doenst distribute malicious file or something bad like that but how come this is happening on this domain but works on other site that use the same technique like this site too ? (as a side note, i’ve already changed the user agent several times but still no luck)

I guess Google just does not like their translation tool being used on this domain :(

Update : I found that Google only allow, several request made in 24 hours. So the only way to fix this is .. i have to wait for another 24 hours before Google allow me to use their translation service once again :(

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Journal, Personal, Website

Placing Adsense on unsupported language

Reaper-X — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:13:33 +0000

Lately i’ve seen many website which is using adsense code on their site. Well .. if their website is using supported language in adsense, i think there’s no problem of course .. but if they’re using adsense on unsupported language ? well .. the Google TOS said that you should not use adsense on unsupported language because it’s the same as violating Google Adsense TOS and might caused you to be banned from Adsense (beside you’re not going to make money from it because the adsense will only display PSA ads)

And that’s why i ask the adsense team about this, because i’m planning on creating another site, and that site is not going to use supported language listed on adsense page

And here’s the reply from the adsense team :

Thanks for your email. At this time, we do not offer ad targeting for Indonesian; ad targeting and support is currently available for the languages listed here: https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=9727. If you place the ad code on pages with content primarily in an unsupportedlanguage, we may show public service ads or ads in another language.

Until we are able to offer this service targeted to your specific language, please remove the AdSense ad code from your site. We appreciate your patience as we expand our program.

If you have have concerns about sites which do not comply with our policies, you can email our specialists directly at adsense-abuse@google.com to help us investigate more efficiently.

From the above message it seems that Google adsense team did not read my email message carefully :P .. anyway … because google forbid placing adsense code on unsupported language .. i guess i’ll wait before creating new website using my local language :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Adsense, Income Sources, Journal, Making Money

Adsense Display Issue or My adsense check has been stolen ?

Reaper-X — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:48:54 +0000

Yesterday i just emailed the adsense team regarding my adsense payment for January, because on the payment history page i saw Google already send my adsense payment since 25 January 2007 and the check has been cleared on 27 February 2007 (the last time i checked my payment history page is on 26 February and i did not see my adsense check status has been cleared at that time). But the problem is until today (28 February) when i posted this i haven’t received the adsense check for January

And that’s why i ask the Google team whether my adsense check has been cashed by someone else or there is display error in their system. And .. today i already received a reply from them and here’s what it’s looks like :

Thank you very much for bringing this issue to our attention. Please know that this is a display issue which our engineering team is aware of and is currently investigating - I'll be sure to send you another email as soon as I have any more information regarding your January payment.

We appreciate your patience and apologize for any confusion caused.

If it’s true there’s a system error on the Google Adsense website .. of course i'm very happy to hear it (but don’t get me wrong). Im happy to hear it because if Google said there’s a system error / display error somewhere that means my adsense check is still safe and has not been stolen and cashed by unknown person

As a note, i thought my adsense check has been stolen at first because i saw various post / article on the internet saying that their adsense check has been cashed by an unknown person. And most of them are come from a third world country like me

Well .. i just hope that my adsense check for january is still safe, and can be delivered to me although for most people it’s not much but .. if its for me .. well .. it means a lot :(

Update : I just received my adsense check today at 11:XX AM (thanks god) .. and that means, there’s an error at Google adsense system somewhere :D

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Adsense, Internet, Journal, Personal

Better badware notifications for webmasters from Google

Reaper-X — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:59:36 +0000

Google recently added a new feature by sending you an email message containing a detailed information if there’s badware found on your site. And here’s what Google said about this :

Webmaster tools notifications

Now instead of simply informing webmasters that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we're also showing example URLs that we've determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.

Email notifications

In addition to notifying webmaster tools users, we've also begun sending email notifications to some of the webmasters of sites that we flag for badware. We don't have a perfect process for determining a webmaster's email address, so for now we're sending the notifications to likely webmaster aliases for the domain in question (e.g., webmaster@, admin@, etc). We considered using whois records, but these often contain contact information for the hosting provider or registrar, and you can guess what might happen if a web host learned that one of its client sites was distributing badware. We're planning to allow webmasters to provide a preferred email address for notifications through webmaster tools, so look for this change in the future.

So far i haven’t received any of the notification about badware problems on my site (hopefully i wont receive an email message saying that mysite has been infected by badware problems or distributing badware), so i can not give you a more detailed explanation about this. Fortunately Matt Cutts already wrote about this badware problems before, so it’d be best for you to read it on his blog

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Network and Security, Webmaster Tools, Website, Website Monitoring