Have you seen Google's new keyword tool?  I'm surprised I haven't read more about it throughout the affiliate blogosphere. Anyway, If you haven't seen it yet, check it out:  http://www.google.com/sktool

Google

This is kind of neat. Google is using search data to chart Flu trends in the United States! They say they have found that the volume of searches for particular keywords are a great indicator for how much Flu activity there is in certain regions.  Here is a quote from their site "We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems".  Gnarly!

Google

Here's a quick way to get a little extra information about ads on sites being served via Google Ad Manager. Just add "google_debug" to the pages query string. Here are some examples on a couple of my sites:

• http://www.greenmarines.com/?google_debug
• http://www.greenmarines.com/?q=query&google_debug
• http://www.brentlamborn.com/?google_debug

This is meant to be a debug window for web masters running Google Ad Manager on their sites. But, if you notice an ad on a page and see that it'sbeing served via Google Ad Manager, you can quickly add "google_debug" to the page's url and get a lot of information about the ad. Like:

• The number of milliseconds it took to generate the message
• A log of all outbound URLs
• All generated HTML rendered inside an iframe
• A log of all returned ads

If you look closely at a few of mine, you can see the affiliate urls I'm using. Not that you can't get those anyway with a HTTP debugger like Fiddler , it's just more fun to do it use the Google debugger and you don't have to click the ad to get the data like you would with an HTTP debugger.

Alternatively, if you'd like to return the ad content but not render ads, add '?google_debug&google_nofetch'. This is particularly useful to test third-party latency, as only Google Ad Manager tags, and not third-party tags, will be called. Example:

• http://www.brentlamborn.com/?google_debug&google_nofetch

You can also have your ad contents returned in a new window by adding '?google_debug&google_norender' to your URL. By doing so, you can test your ads outside of your page environment. Example:

• http://www.brentlamborn.com/?google_debug&google_norender

Google

Here's something interesting I just ran across. It seems if you have an iGoogle Gadget who's content is supplied via an RSS feed containing Adsense for Feeds, the Google Adsense ad will appear on your iGoogle gadget, essentially placing Adsense on a Google homepage (sreenshot below)!  Clicking the ad works too. (Google - take that click away from Dictionary.com)

 

 

Google google

Shut your your pie holes, soup coolers, and cock holsters already!!!! Chrome got old real fast. It's just another way to suck down HTML! Give it a rest!

 

src: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-04-n21.html 

 

 

.....Emmm K I feel better.....

 

 

Google

I'm a huge stats junkie so I thought I'd share this with all of you who also find traffic stats interesing. I posted last week about how links from Adobe.com increased the traffic to this blog by about 1000% . The traffic was mostly referred from Adobe.com with about 62% coming from reffering sites and 18% from search engines. Here is what my referral stats looked like for 5/29/08:

 

And here is what they look like this week:

The traffic I have recieved this week from Adobe.com and other referring sites has dropped off significantly, while search engine traffic continues to climb. I guess this shows what a couple of quality links can do for your search engine rankings.

Google, SEO seo

I was wrong in this post. I said that using a Sitemap (as in a Google Webmaster Tools sitemap) was hurting the total number of pages Google was indexing. Well, when I removed the Sitemap on one of my sites it had nearly 6000 pages indexed . Now it has fewer than 600 . I have other sites that have fewer pages indexed after removing their Sitemaps as well. Time to add them back!

 Just thought I'd try and clear up any mis-information I may have put out there.

Google

For now I am removing all my Sitemaps from Google. From my experience they only work to keep pages out of Google's index. See, my problem is that almost all the pages on all of my sites are dynamically generated from content provided by a database, API's, feeds, and the like. So, keeping an updated Sitemap on a dynamically generated site with 10's of thousands of pages becomes a burden, especially when the site content is provided via API and you just have no idea how many pages are on your site and what they all are. There is just no good way to keep an updated Google Sitemap for sites like this - even if automated.

 I have tried third party sitemap generators that you run and they crawl your site like a search bot, building the XML the whole way. As many pages as one site can have, it can take many many hours to build the XML to the point that it contains all of the pages. Then, a day later, there are 1000 more pages, so it needs built again. And here is the important part. If you submit a Google Sitemap and you are missing pages from your site in the file, those pages missing from the XML won't get indexed. I don't care what Google or anyone says, this is based on raw experience, and Google will only index pages that are in the Sitemap if you submit one. You can have everthing else wide open as far as no follow, robots.txt etc and they won't get indexed if they aren't in the XML.

Case in point: I recently waxed one of my Sitemaps for a dynamically generated site from my Webmaster Tools account. I hadn't updated the Sitemap in a while and so pages weren't getting indexed. Two days after deleteing the sitemap, all of the pages where indexed. I've seen this over and over again.

 From my personal experience and perspective, the only good thing about using a Sitemap when it comes to Google is using it to clear up problems you see with Googlebot crawling your site. That's it. If you don't have problems with Googlebot crawling your site, you are better off just not using a Sitemap, and let the bot run wild. Use robots.txt to block whatever needs blocked.

Google, SEO