That Web Man

…is that they seem to live in some sort of Utopia where spam simply doesn’t exist. Why do I suggest that?

Take a look at their latest product: Google Friend Connect. It’s an application/suite of apps. that can easily add social networking features to an otherwise static website and requires little programming or coding knowledge by the website owner. There’s a video that explains how it works.

All your friends and other members of the public need is a Google Account to be able to interact with your website. And therein lies the problem.

I run a number of message boards and blogs and have noticed more and more of the spam signups/user registrations are coming from confirmed Gmail addresses, i.e. spammers with fire and forget Google accounts. So imagine your spangly new website features. How long before they would be full of comment spams linking to online casinos and drugstores? About as long as it would take for Google to find your site and include it in Google searches, I’d bet.

Such a pity because if that Utopia were to exist, it’d be a fabulous thing.

I’ve mentioned before that I run a YouTube Channel to support my adult website. The stats. for the channel are impressive (to me anyway) with 1.4 million video views, but have you ever wondered where those viewers are coming from and how popular your videos are in relation to specific geographic regions?

Well that’s the sort of information you can now get from YouTube Insight. It’s all explained here in the Official Google Blog entry.

Now all we need are traffic sources and we’ll be there…

Well Sunday was interesting, wasn’t it children?

I wanted to search YouTube to see if a particular video clip was on there - the “Jim’ll Fix It” rollercoaster cub-scouts - and found that YouTube was offline for a good couple of hours.

It now appears that the cause of the problem was Pakistan’s order to block users from visiting YouTube.

Apparently:

“A leading net professional told BBC News: ‘This was probably a simple mistake by an engineer at Pakistan Telecom. There’s nothing to suggest this was malicious.’”

I see.

So what they’re saying is that some witless fecktard in one telecom company in one country can take down a massive online entity like YouTube/Google by mistake?

Well if that’s the case, I expect it won’t be too long before fundamentalists (always with the accent on “mental”) start taking down websites all over the world, just because it appears to be so easy to do so!

You’ll perhaps have noticed that over there in the sidebar are some adverts provided by Google’s AdSense program: they are based upon the content in the page where they are shown and if a visitor clicks through one of them, I get paid a few cents depending upon what the advertiser is willing to pay Google through their corresponding AdWords program. I run AdSense ads. on all my personal blogs and personal sites and I also serve some on one page of one of my businesses’ sites.

I’ll never get rich from displaying Google Ads - I reckon to average less than a dollar a day but hey, $300 a year is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick - but I had noticed that revenues had been falling.

Now the positioning of the ads. over there in this particular sidebar isn’t that good from a layout perspective as most of them are “below the fold”, i.e. you have to scroll down to see them.

Google helpfully provide a useful guide on positioning their ads for maximum exposure/benefit in their AdSense Help Center. There’s a dedicated page for positioning for blogs too.

So as something of an experiment, I changed the positioning and added another set of ads to two of my sites: one a business listing site and the other a blog-based site for a community project I am involved with.

The results have been surprising with both sites performing significantly better since taking into account Google’s suggestions. My advice? Give it a go if you’re serving the ads.

Not signed up to earn money through AdSense? Click on the AdSense button in the sidebar.