Archives for September 2005

AdWords, AdSense, and the Google blog

I spent a year as an engineer in the ads group, but that was a long time ago (28 dog years, at least). So asking me detailed AdSense or AdWords questions is sometimes like asking a cat how an airplane works:

Q to cat: How does an airplane work?
A from cat: Meow?

So when someone asks me how to carry the clickthrough from one NodeGroup to a different currency while preserving their negative matches (yes, I’m making this question up), I’m usually stuck with meow. I keep intending to use AdWords or check out AdSense, but I haven’t had the cycles yet, and I’m not sure when I will.

So if you read this site and want more advertising info, I would hop over to the AdWords blog or the AdSense blog. They’re crunchy with good information and tips. For example, the link I did for the AdWords blog talks about increasing the capacity of the Site Exclusion tool so you can be more selective about where your ads show up in AdSense.

If you haven’t noticed, the Official Google Blog has been getting more solid, too. Take this post for example; I’m a little surprised we talked about how Google can harness the collective wisdom of Googlers, but I’m glad that we did. Was the original incarnation of the Google blog fluffy? Yeah, it kinda was. To be fair, it was launched in the middle of an IPO quiet period, so there were limits to what the blog could discuss. I’m glad that the blog is talking about issues of substance, from Kai-Fu Lee to fair use. Crunchy is good.

Geez. I wrote this up this morning, and completely missed the new Google Group dedicated to talking about AdWords. Cool. Also, I should point out that if you position this book next to this book, they will in fact explode.

Alerting site owners to problems

We’ve started a pilot program to alert sites that we consider to be outside our quality guidelines. Some of this was already discussed on Threadwatch, but let’s put the info in one place in convenient Q&A format:

Q: Are you writing to every site that receives a spam penalty?
A: No. Right now we’re running this as a test.

Q: What sort of sites are you writing to?
A: This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here-while-consolidating-your-debt-and-buy-some-posters-about-online-casinos.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that “Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95” software was doing.

Q: Are these sites penalized forever?
A: No, they can return to the index if they correct or remove the pages that were violating our guidelines. See my previous post about how to do a reinclusion request for advice on that.

Q: Are you emailing webhosts too? Where are you getting email addresses from?
A: We’re not trying to email webhosts, just the site owner or webmaster. Our primary way of finding who to contact is via email addresses from the web. If there really aren’t any, we use a few addresses like webmaster@domain.com and support@domain.com. We may try a contact address by doing a whois search as another backup, but we will avoid emailing the technical or admin contact from whois.

Q: Can you give me an idea of what an example email might look like?
A: Sure. Here’s an example one for hidden text.

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.chefrevival.com.au/,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your
pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines,
which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently
pages from http://www.chefrevival.com.au/ are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:
On http://www.chefrevival.com.au/, we noticed the following hidden text: “Chef Revival Chef Uniforms – A range of stylish, comfortable and durable chef uniforms designed to withstand the pressures of today’s kitchens, Chef apron Chef Jackets Chef Pant Chef trouser Chef headwear Chef Apron Chef Shirt Chef Neckties, Chef aprons Chef Jackets Chef Pants Chef trousers Chef headwears Chef Aprons Chef Shirts Chef Neckties, traditional check chefwear clothes”

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be
reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our
quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion
request at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and
then “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in
ranking,” click Continue, and then make sure to type “Reinclusion
Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Q: Matt, are you excited about this?
A: Heck yeah. I’m glad we’re trying to proactively contact webmasters and site owners when there’s an issue with their site in Google. I’m so excited that I split an infinitive in that sentence, didn’t I? Doh! 🙂

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