MickMel SEO

I’ve been waiting for this for a while, but FeedBurner publishers will soon be able to insert AdSense ads in their feeds.  I’d love to insert some insightful commentary here, but there’s not much else to say.  If you don’t know what AdSense or FeedBurner are, then I don’t know why you’re on an SEO blog.

It’ll be interesting to see how well it works.  I have a couple of very large feeds (not this site - ha!), so I’m anxious to give it a shot.  They’ll be rolling it out to a small group of publishers next week, and the rest of us “soon”.  Once I’m able to try it, I’ll be sure to post my findings.

This isn’t a new plug-in, but it’s new to me and I love it!

I recently converted one of my sites from a custom CMS to WordPress mu.  I manually 301 redirected some of the popular pages, but decided to let the rest of them die off.  However, I just installed the Redirection plug-in and I’m cleaning it up like magic!

It automatically logs 404 errors on the site, then lets you turn that 404 into a 301 redirect with a single click.  I point the 404 to the comparable page on the new blog, and things are quickly falling into place.  I should see much less of a traffic drop-off now that I’m using this.

It won’t be a terribly useful plug-in for most blogs, but if you’re converting any site to use WordPress, this is a great way to get things tidied up.

WordPress Expert points out a site running an alpha version of WordPress 2.6.  They also have a short list of new features appearing in WP 2.6, which include:

• Google Gears Support
• Identicons (default Gravatars)
• Wiki-style post revisions
• “Press This”, a meta bookmarklet.  An example is if you’re watching a YouTube video, you can click the bookmarklet have have a new blog post set up with the video already embedded.  Could be pretty cool!

How have I not seen this before? A friend showed me Jing a few days ago, and I’m in love with it. It’s a software program for Windows or Mac that makes it very easy to capture screenshots or video clips and share them.

I had seen Skitch a few weeks ago, and thought it looked awesome. The problem with it is that it’s Mac-only. A Windows version is “coming soon”, but not here yet. In addition, Skitch only does image capture, while Jing does both images and videos.

To explain how easy Jing is, I’m going to do the following:

• Pull up ESPN
• Grab a screenshot
• Add some arrows pointing to interesting items
• Annotate it a bit
• Post a link to the final, uploaded image
• Time the whole process.

Here we go…

Done! 32 seconds.

http://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2230.png

It’s great! For another brief example, here’s a quick video I just made so you can see how those look:

http://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2246.swf

You’ll probably find quite a few uses for this. I even grabbed the Jing logo at the top of this post by grabbing it from their site using their own software. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

We’re getting pretty close to the official Firefox 3 release, with the new release of Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1.  The beta versions had surprisingly few problems, so I would expect that this RC would be pretty solid.

You’ll probably want to install this program, if for no other reason than to make sure your sites render properly in it.  You can download it here.

Like most blog software, WordPress will ping a list of services each time you write a post.  I’ve spent the last hour or two refining my list and I think it’s pretty solid. Feel free to use this on your own blog if you’d like.  in WordPress, just go to [settings] and then [writing], and there is a box near the bottom that says “Update Services”.  Just copy and paste this list into there and you’re done!

If you have any other additions that you feel deserve to be on the list (or if you think some should be removed), please leave a comment and let me know.

The list:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.feedsky.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

The last few days aside, AdSense tends to keep a pretty consistent pace for me each day. Over the last month, I’ve tried to keep track of my earnings every 30 minutes throughout the day so I could chart them. On 10 different days I was able to get at least 10 different numbers to plot.  Most days started at 6am and ended around midnight.  The missing data was simply interpolated from the surrounding data and the zero hour of 3AM EST (midnight PST).

I figured having this chart would help to me to get a better idea of how the current day is doing, rather than just saying “it feels high” or “it seems low”. The few gems I’ve been able to pull out of it:

• When I get up at 6am, AdSense is between 5-10% of my daily total.
• The halfway point of my day is between 1:15pm and 3:00pm, with the average being right around 2:00.
• When I go to bed (usually around midnight), we’re just over 90% of the daily total.

I’m making a big effort to check the stats less often now, but I thought it’d be fun to generate a chart like that. I hope you find it useful!

My stats looked decent at 6am (EST), and haven’t moved much since.  I just saw a tiny bump a few minutes ago, but that’s about it.  You’re probably seeing the same thing.

There’s still no official word from the AdSense folks, but the AdWords engineers have spoken.  As posted on JenSense and the WMW forums:

Yes - some advertisers are seeing a delay in their stats today. The engineering teams are aware of this and, as you might imagine, are working to resolve it as a priority.

Please know that ads have continued to run as normal. This issue revolves around the reporting of statistics only, and does not impact ad delivery.

I’ll post again when I have anything of substance to add - and, in the meantime, my apology for the inconvenience this is causing you.

AWA

I find it interesting that they said “some” advertisers are seeing a delay, because it appears that all AdSense publishers are.  The thread at WMW has over 75 replies, and all of them are publishers that aren’t seeing any updates.

For more info, you can also check out this long thread at the DP forums.  I’ll post an update in the comments here and on my twitter feed when I hear anything else.

As reported by Darren Rowse, it appears that AdSense ads will be finding their way into Feedburner feeds pretty soon.

There is a feed (Inhabitat) that is showing some ads. They’re being served as image maps, as opposed to JavaScript, which hopefully will help them work with a wider variety of feed readers. I’ve not had much luck with Feedburner FAN (feed advertising network), and not many people had much luck with the older “AdSense for RSS” system either. Hopefully this new format will perform well.

The hot thing for the last year or so is to proclaim “PageRank is useless!  Ignore it!“.  Some of the dumbest things I hear are statements like “A PR2 site can outrank a PR7 site, therefore PageRank is meaningless.“  Duh!  If a higher PR site always ranked better, then Google.com (PR10) would rank first for every query.  There are certainly other factors in play, and PageRank is just a piece of it.

I’ll certainly admit that PageRank isn’t as valuable as it once was.  However, it is still presumed to be a small piece of the Google algorithm (along with 100+ other factors), making it not completely worthless.  It might not help much, but if it helps at all then it can’t be considered “worthless”.

More importantly, it’s crucial to understand what PageRank represents.  It’s the little things that contribute to your PageRank that are worthwhile, and the green bar is a representation of that.

Let’s use a football analogy.  Suppose your team is 10-0, and you’re about to play the team that’s 0-10.  Chances are good that you’ll win.  However, you aren’t going to win based on the fact that you’re 10-0.  In fact, your previous record is of no value in this game.  What is of value are the things that contributed to that 10-0 record.  For example, your team would likely have:

• a big offensive line
• a smart quarterback
• a talented defense
• a clutch kicker

The green PageRank bar is like your 10-0 record.  It won’t help much on it’s own, but it represents other things about your site.  If a site has a PR7 and is ranking well, it’s not ranking there because of the PageRank itself, but because of what that PageRank represents — lots of inbound links, many coming from other quality sites.

This site is a great example of that.  I’ve watched traffic slowly grow since I started writing, and our PageRank has gone up as well.  The PageRank is an indication of the growing number of inbound links that we’ve earned, and those links are helping us rank better, thus increasing our traffic.

Is this a fair assessment of the current state of PageRank?  Do you think it still means more?  Or do you maybe think it’s been pulled from the algorithm and is indeed worthless?