I saw many people at Digital Point and WebMaster World complaining about their Adsense income drop over the past few months. People attributing it to the worldwide economic depression. The proof is here now.

Google has released its 2009 Q1 earning statement recently. Amidst all the complex jargon, two stats are of particular importance to all those affected by Google Adsense. Google Network Revenues and TAC – Traffic Acquisition Costs.

Google Network Revenues are the partner sites generated revenues. The partners include major establishments like Ask.com, New York Times etc and all bloggers and small sites owners. This can include revenues under other programs as well.

TAC – Traffic Acquisition Costs are the portion of revenues Google has received only with Adsense programs.

As the graph below shows, TAC is on the decline since Q32008. This means Google is earning lesser by every quarter through its Adsense Program.

Google earning has a direct bearing on the publisher earning, hence you may be seeing lesser moolah through the Adsense on your site.

All in all, don’t fret if you are seeing a lesser amount in your account everyday. It’s happening with everyone!

PS: If you want to explore programs beyond Google Adsense, here is a pretty good list of adsense alternatives.

Want to get an update as soon as we publish new article? I recommend you to subscribe via RSS Feed. You can also subscribe by email and have new articles sent directly to your inbox. It's absolutely free!

I was looking to integrate chat box in one of my landing pages. Being a fan of Google and its services, I got this Google talk chatback badge that is simple to maintain and it allows me to talk right from my Gmail without installing any client or opening any browser.

So far so good, what’s the issue?

The problem lies with the message that shows up, when your visitor clicks the link to chat with you. Here is what it has to say:

You are chatting with an unidentified user. Be careful what you discuss.

Now, I understand that the user visiting my site is not my friend and should be advised to bear restrain.

But why am I(the site owner) an unidentified user? Doesn’t Google have all my credentials with them?  I think it looks quite a negative message and carries negative connotations with it. Probably it could be changed to:

You are chatting with someone who might not be in your friend list. Be careful what you discuss.

I will be attending Google SearchMasters conference ‘09 going to be held at Bangalore,India on 28th/Feb/09. 

I have attended and spoken at many conferences earlier that are related to my profession – Software Engineering. But this is the first time, I will be attending conference related to webmasters. I am pretty excited about it. Do let me know if you are coming.

For those who were not able to register earlier or are unable to come to this conference, don’t worry. Google India will be posting the conference videos and updates at its official blog.

I "ll also try to come up with the details here soon after the conference. Subscribe Now to not miss any further details.

This comes straight from Google. In collaboration with the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute and  the PlanetLab Consortium, Google has launched Measurement Lab. Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open platform that you can use to test your internet connection. Though there are tools already available in the market that can help you with such needs but most of them do not provide an accurate description of the problem. Mainly because of the lack of widely-distributed servers with ample connectivity.

Acc. to the post from Official Google Blog:

M-Lab aims to address these problems. Over the course of early 2009, Google will provide researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on. M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish.

As of now there are three tools available:

Network Diagnostic Tool 

Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) provides a sophisticated speed and diagnostic test. An NDT test reports more than just the upload and download speeds — it also attempts to determine what, if any, problems limited these speeds, differentiating between computer configuration and network infrastructure problems. While the diagnostic messages are most useful for expert users, they can also help novice users by allowing them to provide detailed trouble reports to their network administrator.

Glasnost 

Glasnost attempts to detect whether your Internet access provider is performing application-specific traffic shaping. Currently, you can test if your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent. Tests for other applications will follow soon.

Network Path and Application Diagnosis 

NPAD diagnoses some of the common problems effecting the last network mile and end-users’ systems. These are the most common causes of all performance problems on wide area network paths.

There are other tools like DiffProbe (To determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic) and  NANO (To determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations) that are in pipeline.

Coming from Google we can be assured of reliability of these tools. I had faced this issue in the past and I can tell you it becomes quite annoying when neither you nor your ISP, webhost are able to pinpoint the source of error. It took me a lot of time dealing with my webhost , DNS and ISP to sort out this issue.

Great initiative from Google! Don’t forget to bookmark this site.

Just saw “Adsense For Domains” link in my adsense reports today.[Much earlier than I have anticipated in my earlier post on adsense for domains ] Those Indian publishers who were eagerly waiting for this announcement, your time has arrived. Enjoy!

PS: I have blogged about some FAQs related to adsense for domain. Check them out.

If you are into searching your machines regularly for files, there is no excuse for not having Google Desktop installed on your machines.

I use Google desktop almost daily. Many a times I want to locate a file and just want to see in which folder it is residing and do not necessarily want to open it, especially when it is an .exe or a .vbs file.

Earlier when I wanted to do this, I would hover mouse over one of the results and memorize it to manually navigate to the folder.

 

Today, by accident, I click on the right arrow key while I was on one of the results and voila, it popped up “Open Folder” as can be seen in the image below.

Now I can click on “Open Folder” and directly go it without opening the file or memorizing full address. [You can also right click while on the result, to get the “Open Folder” option]

My prediction went true, Google has updated toolbar Page Rank on the eve of new year. Generally it takes about 2-3 days to take effect and to propagate to all websites but this time it seems they have completed it in 24 hrs straight. As Matt Cutts says …

It’s pretty much done now.

Last page rank update fell around September’08 and toppers maintain their position. Google.com and Usa.gov(the official website of US Government) have a perfect page rank of 10.

Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe are at 9 PR while Intel.com is down by 1 point to 8. You can check your Page Rank through the umpteen number of tools lying all over the web.

This blog’s went up by 1 point to become Page Rank 2 now. Did you see any change in your blog’s PR?

If you are planning to conduct a free online survey or a poll, don’t look beyond Google Docs. It has all the features you want and is easy to set up. Though there are oldies in the market like PollDaddy but the free options provided by them are very much restrictive in nature. PollDaddy only allows 100 survey responses/month . The other one that came on #1 position of Google Search on the term “free online survey” provides 20 survey/month only. There seems to be no such restriction with Google Docs.

With Google docs you can get as many survey responses as you want and is not difficult to set up either. Here is a step-by-step guide to set up an online survey using Google docs-

1. Log into Google Docs using your Google Account id.
2. Choose New > Form. [To speed up, you also have the option to choose a template form. Google keeps on adding new templates to gallery.] 
3. Fill in your survey questions. Your survey questions can be in the form of text, multiple choice questions(radio buttons), drop downs, on a scale , free text(big rectangular box for detailed answers).
4. You will see a URL on the bottom, that’s the URL to your survey.
5. The answers will get collected in an spreadsheet residing in your Google Account.
6. To get notified as soon as someone submits a form click on See Responses > Spreadsheet.

   

7. Once you are on the spreadsheet go to Tools > Notifications rules.
8. Set the notification rules. If you want to receive a mail as soon as someone fills in the form check Notify Me When A user submits a form checkbox and Notify Me With Email Right Away checkbox.

You are done. Gozar!

For the uninitiated, Google Adsense for domains is a program from Adsense that allow publishers to place adsense on undeveloped domains. The idea behind this is to let user find related relevant information rather than 404’s and also let the publisher make some money from the clicks that get generated on undeveloped domains. Till sometime back, this program was only available to big domain name registrars and domain parking companies like Sedo, Godaddy etc.

What can be termed as a big decision, Google is now opening up this program for all publishers. Most of the terms and conditions that are applicable for normal adsense usage are applicable for Adsense for domains too. Check TOS. Here are some quick facts about Adsense for domains program-

• A maximum of 1500 domains are allowed per publisher.
• It won’t work like normal adsense where we can just copy and paste the code. You need to modify your DNS settings – like CNAME and ANAME Record. Here are the complete Instructions for major Domain Name Providers.
• You can’t use Google adsense for domains with any other Google service. For example, you can’t use Google Apps and Adsense for domains on the same domain. Though adsense for domain on example.com and Google Apps service on mail.example.com (sub-domain) should be fine. Refer.
• With this program, you can change the look and feel of your entire page (not only the adsense ad) right from your adsense account. Some of the options available are-
• With adsense for domains you have the option to provide keywords. The keywords provided by you may be used while targeting ads. While specifying keywords make sure that you don’t give conflicting keywords for ambiguous domain names. For example if your domain name is appleforum.com, then either enter keywords that refer to fruit apple or enter keywords that refer to the company apple. But not to both. Refer some more hints.
• Here is a quick start guide on Google Adsense for domains.

As of now this program is only available to US publishers. Considering Google’s past record with such releases, it should be available to non-US publishers within 6 months.

Now why it can sound death bells to domain parking companies?

Most of the domain parking companies use ad feed from Google, Yahoo or Ask. Domain owners flock to them just because they want to utilize their unused domains and make some money out of it. The money made from such ads is divided between Google, domain parking company and publisher. With the introduction of this program, the middle-men (domain parking companies) can be easily cut. Thus making more moolah for a publisher. I guess in coming future these domain parking companies would get reduced to a market place or an escrow service provider for domain buyers/sellers.

As Matt Cutts noted in his comments on Sphinn – about 88 days back – we can safely assume that the next Page Rank update should be round the corner and should fall around new year. (or as soon as Googlians return from their vacations?) This is what he has to say-

I’m glad that new PageRanks showed up this weekend as expected; after this toolbar update, I expect us to get back to the normal 3-4 month cycle.

So, be prepared. All the Best!