I’d like to announce the release of my second Greasemonkey script: Google Numbered Search Results; which numbers the SERP entries delivered by the Google search engine.

Other Scripts To Number Google Search Results

If you’re someone who’s likely to use this (ie an SEO practitioner or website administrator checking their rankings), you’re probably saying "Wait! Aren’t there already Greasemonkey scripts for this?"

Yes there are.

For years, I’ve relied on the Numbered Google Results script, but it seems it’s not being updated. When Google introduced the SearchWiki functionality, it stopped working, prompting me to write a simple hack to fix the problem. I left a comment on the script’s home page, but the fix wasn’t added to the script. I’m not complaining, because I didn’t email the author (Dave Child) directly – I had my fix and, as a user, I was happy.

Now, Google has introduced AJAX powered search results, which has broken Numbered Google Results again (along with many other Greasemonkey scripts). AJAX powered search results have been being phased in for a while now, but recently it’s become a lot more common.

There’s also another script, Google Search Results – Numbered, but it starts at 1 on every page. For example, items on the first page of results will be numbered 1 to 10 and items on the second page will also be numbered 1 to 10 (instead of 11 to 20). I didn’t even bother seeing if it worked with the AJAX powered search.

What This Script Offers

Instead, I wrote my own script, which works with the AJAX powered search results, SearchWiki and can number entries appropriately for pages other than the first one.

I didn’t mean to write my own. I started off hacking Numbered Google Results, but I ran into a serious problem I couldn’t resolve, so I started again from scratch. As it happens, I encountered the same problem and my eventual solution could have worked with Numbered Google Results.

My eventual solution will also help many other Greasemonkey scripts for Google Search, so I’ll write up what I did in case it’s useful for others – although I should point out I didn’t actually make it work with the AJAX powered search results, I just worked out how to bypass them and force the use of the traditional search.

This may not work forever, as Google may eventually turn off the traditional search, but such is the life of a Greasemonkey script: when the site changes, the script breaks.

Acknowledgements

As with my first Greasemonkey script, Bing Numbered Search Results, I’ve embedded jQuery. Thanks to John Resig and his team!

I started by hacking the Numbered Google Results script, which obviously helped me write my own. Thanks to Dave Child for a great plugin to start with.

Where Can I Get It

You can find out more about it at the Google Numbered Search Results home page or you can skip straight to Userscripts.org if you want to download it.

Description

Google Numbered Search Results is a Greasemonkey script that numbers the search results pages on the Google search engine.

There are other scripts out there which do the same thing, but none of them work with the new AJAX powered search results being introduced by Google. This script does – well actually it doesn’t, it just forces the old search to be used, but the user won’t notice any problem, it will just work for them.

Details

Current version: 1.0 (9 September 2009)
Download: from Userscripts.org
License: Dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses

Credits

The Google Numbered Search Results script uses jQuery created by John Resig (embedded in the script). Thanks to John and the jQuery team.

Tonight I was browsing the Internet, when my virus software notified me of a potential threat from openstat.ws. None of the websites open in Firefox had a link to this site in the source. After some investigation, it appears that the potentially malicious site is called by Google Adsense.

Avast Anti-virus Warning Message

I use Avast Antivirus on my computer and tonight it gave the following warning message while I was browsing the Internet:

Sign of "HTML:Iframe-inf" has been found in "http://openstat.ws/top.php\{gzip}" file

The inclusion of a URL made me suspect that one of the sites I was browsing was linking to a dodgy website (ie openstat.ws).

The obvious thing to do was to check the source of the sites open in Firefox, to see which one was the culprit. However, openstat.ws did not appear in the source of any of the pages. Not to be put off, I used the Web Developer toolbar to examine the generated source. Still nothing.

Google Says Openstat.ws Is Suspicious

Next stop, a Google search for openstat.ws. The number one result was the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page for openstat.ws page. Because the nature of this page is that it may change often, I’ve grabbed a screenshot of what it’s showing tonight:

Okay, so Google are saying:

Site is listed as suspicious – visiting this web site may harm your computer.

They say the site was only listed for suspicious activity once in the last 90 days, but they also say:

Of the 6 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent.

I’m not a security expert and I may be reading this wrong (please let me know if I am), but that seems to be indicating that there’s a 50% chance of malicious software being installed from openstat.ws.

Norton Say Openstat.ws Is A Threat

The third result in the Google search was Norton Safe Web’s page on openstat.ws. Let’s see what they say about openstat.ws:

Norton are saying that there are two threats found on openstat.ws, one of which is:

Threat Name: Direct link to HTTP Malicious Toolkit Variant Activity

Location: http://openstat.ws/top.htm

The file Avast picked up on my computer is top.php, but top.htm is pretty close. HTTP Malicious Toolkit Variant Activity sounds pretty nasty. Norton say:

Severity: High

This attack could pose a serious security threat. You should take immediate action to stop any damage or prevent further damage from happening.

Okay, I’m convinced now that I don’t want openstat.ws being called on my computer. But how can I stop it where I can’t find where it’s being called from.

Looking Under Firefox’s Hood – Sessionstore.js

If openstat.ws wasn’t being called by the websites I was visiting, perhaps it was being called by Firefox itself. I started thinking that Firefox or one of the extensions I run must have been compromised. I started looking through the Firefox files – admittedly without much of an idea of what I was looking for.

I started by looking in the \Documents and Settings\[username]\ Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profilename] folder. I ordered the files in date order and started going through the most recently modified files.

I soon came to sessionstore.js. It gave me the answer, although it wasn’t the answer I was expecting. Sessionstore.js seems to store the current session, presumably so it can be restored in the case of Firefox crashing. I’m not sure if this is default behaviour or part of the Session Manager extension.

It consists of a series of entries tags, one for each tab that’s open. In examining this, I found the following:

EDIT: Due to Syntax Highlighter performance issues, I’ve moved the sessionstore.js snippet into a text file.

That’s not particularly readable, but it’s saying that I’ve got Ozh’s Handling Plugins Options in WordPress 2.8 with register_setting() post open. Inside that there is a child URL open (http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/etc) which is a Google Adsense ad. Inside that, there are some further children, down until we come to one for http://openstat.ws/top.php, which is our suspicious site.

At this point we are still inside the Google Adsense child, meaning that the site that Google lists as suspicious is actually being served through Adsense. This is a little worrying to say the least!

Note: There is absolutely nothing wrong with Ozh’s site apart from the fact that he is running Adsense – as do I and hundreds of thousands of other sites.

Final Thoughts

As I said, I’m not a security expert, so I’d love some feedback from some more knowledgable. I’d also love to hear if anyone else out there has come across this problem.

I was recently optimizing Adsense on one of my Blogger sites and decided I wanted to place Adsense inside the posts – but only on single posts, not on the home page or in the archives. Here’s how.

Why Blogger?

Although my primary blog platform is WordPress, I do occasionally use Blogger for some side projects. Why? Go and read everything that Grizzley’s written on his Make Money Online For Beginners site. Blogger can be an excellent option. It’s free, easy to create a site, can scale to handle massive traffic etc.

The only downside to Blogger is the limited ability to customize the site. With WordPress I can change pretty much anything I want. With Blogger I can only change things within the narrow framework that Blogger allows. In this case, I ran into the limitations with the built-in options to display Adsense ads.

Blogger’s Built In Options To Display Adsense

The easiest way to add Adsense to a Blogger blog is via the built-in gadget. I won’t go through the whole process, as it’s written about elsewhere, but you can add an Adsense gadget in the same way you can add a Profile gadget, Text gadget, Poll gadget, etc. Just go to Layout, then Page Settings, then click on Add a Gadget, select the Adsense gadget and then configure it.

The first time you use it, Blogger will ask you for your Adsense publisher number and link the blog to your Adsense account. Then you simply decide where you want the gadget to appear, what size and colour the ads should be and you’re off! You’re ready to start making money online.

You can also add Adsense between posts. To do this, click Edit on the Body gadget and turn on the Show Adsense Between Posts option. You’ll then be presented with the same options that the gadget gives you (size, colour etc).

Limitations With Built-In Options

There are several limitations to using Blogger’s built-in Adsense gadget:

1. Can’t Put Adsense Ads Within Posts

The main limitation with using the built-in Adsense gadget is that you can’t place ads within a post. You can add them before posts, after posts, between posts, in the sidebar, but not in the actual post.

It’s well known that the CTR (click through rate) is higher for ads within a post than for ads in other positions. So putting Adsense within a post will make more money for you. I cover how to do this below.

2. Can’t Use Channels

Another limitation of the built-in Adsense gadget is that you can’t use channels to track the performance of ad units.

However, this isn’t really a limitation – if you want to use channels, simply create your code on the Adsense site, then copy and paste your Adsense code into a JavaScript gadget, instead of using an Adsense gadget. In all other ways it will work the same as the Adsense gadget.

3. Blogger Only Shows Three Ad Units

The last limitation is only an issue for those people who place an Adsense unit in the sidebar. Some people choose not to do this, but I find that an Adsense unit in the sidebar performs relatively well (not as good as units at the top of the page, but better than those lower down the page).

The problem is that Google makes sure that only three ad units are displayed on a Blogger page, as per their Terms Of Service. Great in general, but it means you have less control over which ad units appear. Unfortunately the sidebar is rendered last in most templates, so it’s one of the units that disappear if there are too many units on the page.

This won’t happen on the single post page. However, if you display ads between posts (or within posts) then the sidebar ad unit will disappear on pages with multiple posts, such as the home page and archive pages. I explain how to overcome this below.

Adsense Within Posts

As I mentioned above, you can’t place Adsense ads within the post body using the built-in gadgets. To do this, we’re going to have to put our Adsense code directly into the template.

We still can’t put the ad unit in the middle of the post, but we can put it at the top of the post, below the title, with the text wrapping around it. Great! That’s proven to be the most effective placement, so that’s exactly what we want.

Now, the technique used to do this isn’t new. In fact I learned how to do it by reading Bonnie Calhoun’s Wrapping Adsense in Blog Post. You can go and read her post for the full instructions, but here are the basic steps:

1. Get your Adsense code from the Adsense website
2. Parse the code to replace special characters with HTML entities
3. In Blogger, go to Layout, then choose Edit HTML
4. Make a backup of your template by clicking Download Full Template
5. Click Expand Widget Templates
6. Search for <data:post.body/> or <p><data:post.body/></p>
7. Place your Adsense code on the line immediately above this
8. Save the template

Note 1: It’s very important to parse the code as per Bonnie’s site (ie replace < with &lt; and > with &gt; etc). If you do not do this, your Adsense units will not display correctly and you risk being banned by Google.

Note 2: You probably want to place your Adsense code within a floating div, so that the text wraps around it.

Here’s what the code will look like (with the publisher specific information removed). The first and last lines should already exist in the template, the rest is what you’re adding.

<div class='post-body entry-content'>
<div style='float: left;'>
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;&lt;!--
google_ad_client = &quot;pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&quot;;
google_ad_host = &quot;pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&quot;;
google_ad_slot = &quot;xxxxxx&quot;;
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
//--&gt;
&lt;/script&gt;
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;
src=&quot;http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js&quot;&gt;
&lt;/script&gt;
</div>
<p><data:post.body/></p>

This solves the problem of getting Adsense to appear within the post, driving up CTR. However, the sidebar unit will still disappear on the home page, as there will be more than 3 units on the page (one embedded in each post).

Only Showing Adsense In Posts On A Single Post

To solve the problem of the sidebar unit disappearing, I decided that I only wanted to show Adsense within the post (ie solution in the previous section) on single posts. I didn’t want this ad unit to appear on the home page or on archive pages.

It would be easy enough to do this in WordPress / PHP, but I had no idea how to customize a Blogger template. I consulted Blogger’s Help facility and found a list of Layouts Data Tags, which let me see what could be done. Despite the options being fairly limited, I found the answer I needed: The pageType tag, which can have a value of ‘item’, ‘archive’ or ‘index’.

My XML coding skills are a little rusty, but thankfully it wasn’t hard to work out how to include some HTML based on the type of page:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
PUT YOUR CODE HERE
</b:if>

This says: If it’s a single post, include the HTML (obviously you have to put it in). So single posts (pageType of item) will display the HTML, but the home page (pageType of index) and archive pages (pageType of archive) will not.

Applying this to our Adsense problem, here is the full code you need (with the publisher specific information removed). Use this instead of the code in the Adsense Within Posts section above. The first and last lines should already exist in the template, the rest is what you’re adding.

<div class='post-body entry-content'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<div style='float: left;'>
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;&lt;!--
google_ad_client = &quot;pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&quot;;
google_ad_host = &quot;pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&quot;;
google_ad_slot = &quot;xxxxxxxxxx&quot;;
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
//--&gt;
&lt;/script&gt;
&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;
src=&quot;http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js&quot;&gt;
&lt;/script&gt;
</div>
</b:if>
<p><data:post.body/></p>

Of course, this means that only two Adsense units will be shown on the home page. If you’re doing things properly, most of your visitors should arrive on single posts, via the search engines, so this solution’s good enough for me.

Final Thoughts

If you want to make money online and you’ve decided that using Adsense on Blogger is the way to do it, then optimize it!

Hopefully this has helped you a) increase your CTR by showing you how to place Adsense units at the top of your posts and b) how to preserve income from the sidebar unit by stopping it from disappearing on multiple post pages.

On 20 November 2008, Google introduced SearchWiki, allowing users to customize their search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding and commenting on them. I’m not going to cover how SearchWiki works, nor am I going to examine whether the impact of SearchWiki is positive or negative.

I was going to moan about how SearchWiki broke the Numbered Google Results script for Greasemonkey. Instead, I just worked out how to fix it. Here’s a simple hack to the Numbered Google Results script which allows it to work with SearchWiki.

SearchWiki Breaks The Numbered Google Results

The Numbered Google Results Greasemonkey script basically does what it’s title says: it numbers the results presented in Google’s Search Results. This allows you to instantly identify where a website is ranked. This is very useful for SEOs who are monitoring the progress of their websites in the SERPs.

You can see it in action in the following screenshot – note the numbers before each entry.

With the introduction of SearchWiki, the numbered results broke. Certain results, such as News results from Google, still show a number, but normal search results don’t. You can clearly see this in the following screenshot.

Solution – Hacking The Numbered Google Results Script

Thankfully, this problem can be easily solved by making a very simple hack to the script. Here are the steps (assuming you have installed the script):

1. Right-Click on the Greasemonkey icon in Firefox
2. Click Manage User Scripts and a dialog box will open
3. Select Number Google Results from the list
4. Click the Edit button (at the bottom of the dialog box)
5. If asked for the location of a text editor, find one on your hard drive (if you use Notepad, start by looking for C:\Windows\Notepad.exe)
6. Make the change shown below, then Save, Close and click Okay
7. Refresh (F5) Google to make sure the changes are loaded

Here’s the change. Find the following line (at around line 54):

if (tp.className == 'g') {

and change it to:

if (tp.className == 'g' || tp.className == 'g w0') {

I told you it was simple! You should now get numbered results whether you are logged into Google or not. SearchWiki won’t break it.

This morning I noticed an entry on Sphinn highlighting GreyWolf’s Seth Godin Wants to Cheat Advertisers with Fake Clicks post. It discusses Seth Godin’s Ads are the new online tip jar post, which suggests that readers should click ads to reward bloggers for their writing. To quote Seth:

If you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.

GreyWolf condemns Seth’s advice and rightly points out that anyone following this advice is guilty of click fraud:

If you click on an ad and your purpose is to make sure the site owner or blogger gets money from the click, and you had no intent to buy or research, that is click fraud.

As you’d expect, given they are Internet Marketing / SEO communities, comments on GreyWolf’s post and on Sphinn strongly condemn Seth’s statement. The majority of commentators agree that this is click fraud. I concur!

However, what’s intrigued me is that no-one’s mentioned the effect this may have on a blog being smart priced by Google. Seth’s advice may actually end up costing bloggers who run Google Adsense.

I’m not sure why no-one’s mentioned this. It may be that most members of those communities fall on the advertising, rather than publisher, side of the fence. I’m definitely on the publisher side, so I’ll go ahead and explore the impact on smart pricing.

What Is Smart Pricing?

I’m not going to go into what smart pricing is in detail. That’s been covered before, both by myself in my How To Avoid Adsense Smart Pricing On Blogs post, and by better bloggers than me.

The short description is that smart pricing is a penalty applied by Google, resulting in the amount of money you receive when someone clicks an Adsense ad (on your site) being only a fraction of what you would normally receive.

If you want to find out more about smart pricing, the best description I’ve found is Grizzly’s Optimization Tips for Adsense. Read his long article in full for a good understanding, but here’s his quick summary of smart pricing:

If you are running ads on your blog that an advertiser has bid $0.50 per click on and your traffic clicks the ads and doesn’t convert well for the advertiser then Google will not pay you the usual $0.25 per click. They will likely give you $0.01 to $0.05 per click. This means you have been smart priced. This will also mean that you will receive lower payouts on every site you have Adsense on – not just the poorly converting site. This is a penalty because you are not optimizing your Adsense pages in order to give the advertiser the most bang for his or her buck.

So basically, if clicks from your site give advertisers a low conversion rate, you get a huge penalty on what you earn.

But It’s More Complicated Than That

There’s more at play here than what I’ve described above. Admittedly, no-one but Google really knows how it works, but Grizzly knows as much as anyone else and mentions targeted traffic.

Google considers where the traffic comes from and how much value traffic is to the advertiser. Even if the visitor doesn’t buy anything from the advertiser, if it’s targeted traffic, Google considers that you’ve delivered quality traffic to the advertiser. As Grizzly explains:

My best advertiser is looking for people looking to “make money online”. The ad says “Make Easy Money Online”. Most of my traffic – about 75% find my blog searching on Google for the term “make money online” or a long tail version of that term. If one of my visitors clicks on the ad they are most likely looking for what the advertiser has to offer and even if they don’t buy, Google can charge the advertiser full price because the visitor left a “make money online” trail. They found me using the term and they found the advertiser because of the term. That is as targeted as traffic can get and Google can charge the advertiser full price. If all my traffic came from stumble upon and clicked the ads then the advertiser wont get many conversions and Google can see where the traffic originated, knows it isn’t targeted and will penalize me and give the advertiser a rebate.

So you’re more likely to be smart priced if a high percentage of the visitors clicking ads, arrived at your site from a source other than a search engine.

Seth Godin Could Cost You Money

How can you avoid smart pricing? The answer: Try to ensure you’re delivering targeted traffic (ie from search engines) to the advertisers and that a good percentage of that traffic converts for the advertiser.

If your regular readers follow Seth’s advice and click on ads to reward you, you’ll get more clicks, but you won’t be delivering targeted traffic to the advertiser and only a low percentage of people will actually buy anything.

That puts you squarely in smart pricing territory. Thanks Seth!

If you only have one site, the impact may not be so bad: There’s no guarantee you’ll be smart priced and anyway, a lot of low value clicks may equal a few high value clicks.

However, the risk is not worth it, especially if you have other sites running Adsense. If you get smart priced on your blog, you get smart priced on all your sites. That could really cost you.

Final Thoughts

I’ve got nothing against Seth Godin – he’s obviously very well respected – but I think he’s wrong on this occasion. I’m far from an expert in this, but leaving the click fraud argument aside, it seems his advice, aimed at helping bloggers, could actually hurt them if they run Google Adsense ads.

As a publisher, I don’t want my normal visitors to click ads. When people choose to click ads on my site, I want them to be highly targeted search engine visitors, who’ll lead to a higher advertiser conversion rate and won’t get me smart priced.

Oh, if you came to this post from Sphinn or StumbleUpon, or you’re one of my regulars, and you’re wondering why you can’t see Adsense on this blog, well you can’t. Only search engine visitors see Adsense ads on this blog.

I recently read a post which picked up a humourous (but offensive) result returned by Google Search via the sitelinks feature.

I thought I’d check it out to see if it had been fixed, either by Urban Dictionary or by Google themselves. However, when I tried the search, I didn’t get any sitelinks at all. Instead, I saw something I’d never seen before: a search box, embedded in the search results!

A picture says a thousand words, so here it is:

Using the embedded search box performs a Google Search only on the site in question (in this case Urban Dictionary). The results are the same as if you had used the Google Search site feature in the normal search box.

For example, I typed “blogging” in the embedded search box and clicked the “Search urbandictionary.com” button and got the following results:

Note the “blogging site:urbandictionary.com” in the main search box. This indicates that the embedded search box simply performs a normal Google site search on the site in question.

I’m sure that other people out there have noticed this and blogged about it before me, but I’ve never heard of it or seen it before, so I figured it was worth writing about.

I guess this is a new feature Google has introduced to improve the usefulness of their search results. It probably won’t add much value to experienced users who could just use the Google Search site feature, but it may be useful for the average user who doesn’t know how to use this.

Following my own advice in my last post, about not sitting on semi exclusive news, I thought I better get this post out quickly! I’m not sure if this has been reported elsewhere, or even how long the change has been in place, but it seems that Google have made a tweak to their Search facility.

It’s only a very minor change, but may be of interest to some…

Background

When you do a search using the quote marks, Google returns only those pages which have that exact phrase on it. For example, if I search for:

some random phrase that I type

it will give me any pages which have all of those words somewhere on the page (or in the URL, or in the meta tags, etc).

When I search for:

“some random phrase that I type”

it will only give me pages which have that exact phrase (ie those words together, exactly as in between the quote marks).

This technique is often used by people researching keywords for use with niche sites, as it lets them know exactly how many other sites have the exact phrase they are targeting. These sites may be their competition!

The Change

As I said above, it’s only a very minor change.

In the past, if I searched for a phrase (using quotes) that didn’t exist, then it returned nothing. I would have received a message that my search didn’t match any documents and some advice on changing my search term so it would find something.

Now, it tells me that there are no results found, but it also returns the results for the search term without the quotes.

An example can be seen below.

Not startling news, just something minor, but a good move by Google.

I’ve just noticed that both the Search Status extension for Firefox and the Google Toolbar for IE are reporting More Than Scratch The Surface as having a toolbar PageRank of 5. This is 1 higher than the PR4 the site had the last time I noticed (a couple of days ago).

My secondary site, Jobs In China, is now showing a PR4, where it was previously unranked.

I’ve tried to confirm these figures through about 10 different PageRank checkers, but can’t do so. In most cases, the old values appear. In a few cases, 0 or NaN appear. None show the figures that Search Status and Google Toolbar are showing.

So, is there a toolbar PageRank update in progress?

None of the sites in my feed reader are reporting anything. Perhaps, I’m the first to notice, although I think this unlikely! I just hope it’s not a blip that will be gone in the morning!

I’m out of time to check other sites tonight, so if anyone can confirm that a toolbar PR update is underway, please let me know.

More Than Scratch The Surface has finally been penalised by Google. I noticed today that my toolbar PageRank has dropped from PR4 to PR0. It appears to only be a toolbar PR penalty – I am still in the same place in the SERPs.

I say finally, because I’ve been watching other sites get penalised, while mine remained untouched. The cause of my penalty: two sponsored posts I wrote about three months ago. Until now, Google hadn’t noticed them.

Goodbye PayPerPost

Like RT, I’ve said goodbye to PayPerPost. I only did two sponsored posts and it’s almost 3 months since the last one. I initially stopped doing them because I couldn’t find any fitting the subject of this blog. Then, as more and more blogs were penalised by Google, I decided to hold off doing any more.

I thought about adding nofollow to the links when Terence Chang recently lost his toolbar PR. I’m not sure why I didn’t. If I’m honest, I guess I thought that if Google hadn’t already penalised me, then they must have missed me. So if you are thinking about fixing any issues on your site, do it today!

I’ve now added nofollow to the links and requested reconsideration via Google’s Webmaster Tools. Now, I wait and hope my toolbar PR is restored.

Why Am I Worried About Toolbar PR?

Cynics will be asking why I’m so worried about toolbar PR, given my somewhat anti-Google stance on previous posts, such as Final Thoughts On The PageRank Debacle and I Signed Up For PayPerPost.

There are several reasons for my change of stance:

1. Originally, I was angry that so many fine bloggers were penalised for what was normal practice. It felt like Google was being very unfair. I’ll admit I didn’t know anything about Google’s Terms Of Service at the time. Since then, I’ve come to realise that Google had stated that the nofollow tag must be added to paid reviews and advertising. I still feel that Google should have communicated this better to the average blogger before penalising them, but in hindsight, they could have reduced real PR rather than just toolbar PR. A turning point in my attitude came when I read a well-considered defence of Google.
2. I originally thought, like many others, that I didn’t need Google. I’ve since come to realise that although it may be possible to have a successful site without Google search traffic, this traffic is where most of the money is. Search engine visitors are the one who are most likely to click ads or buy something (whether from Adsense or Amazon). Turning your back on Google’s search traffic has to be considered as shooting yourself in the foot. If I value the search traffic, I have to play by Google’s rules. I’m now happy to do so: In fact only 3 days ago, I turned down an approach to buy links on my site.
3. I was making very little from Adsense at the time and it appeared that sponsored posts were a better option. This may indeed be the case for some blogs, but I’ve come to understand Adsense much better since then. As I’ve learnt more about Adsense, it’s started performing better – and it’ll only get better as my site grows. Long term, Adsense is a better option.
4. Although toolbar PR is pretty much irrelevant (it’s your real PR and position in the SERPs that really matter), most people don’t realise that. Why is that important? Well, it’d important if I wanted to sell links or write sponsored posts, because they’re based on toolbar PR, but I’m not going to do that! However, I’ll be moving to Brisbane in about 3 months and I’ll be looking for a web-related job. You never know, a PR4 website may help me get such a job, a PR0 site probably won’t!

Final Thoughts

I didn’t have to post this. Google don’t care whether I make this post or not. I could have just requested reconsideration quietly without mentioning it and most people wouldn’t have noticed. But that’s not my way. If I feel I’ve made a mistake, I’ll put my hand up and admit it.

In the past I’ve said things that were anti-Google and pro-sponsored posts. At the time I believed what I said and there is an element of truth in those statements. It may be that for some people, sponsored posts are the best way to monetize their sites. It’s quick and easy money for a small blog, while Adsense won’t start working well until you’ve built your blog up and you understand how it works a little better.

However, I’ve come to realise that in the bigger picture, Google search traffic is a very important element of a successful site. It’s not something I want to lose, so I’ll play by Google’s rules. Today, I’ve only lost my toolbar PR, tomorrow it may be my real PageRank and my position in the SERPs.