Webby Thoughts

Google changed the AdSense ads by making less of the AdSense ad area clickable to prevent accidental clicks. Fair enough. In theory if the CTR drops because their are less accidental clicks, then the amount paid per click should go up because the clicks that do happen are more purposeful. Or something like that.

Anyway, some people seem to have seen their CTR drop through the floor. Others haven’t been affected that badly by the change to the AdSense ads. It hasn’t seemed to change my CTR one way or the other on any of my blogs.

After noticing something earlier today, I went on a hunt for people running sidebar ads and was actually surprised by how many blogs that I know used to run AdSense that don’t anymore. But, eventually, I found a post on mommy bytes that had the ads in the right sidebar. The clickable area was indeed the new smaller area. Here is a poor image to show it, but feel free to click over to Angela’s site to check for yourself.

Then I went did a Google search for “cats” and came up with this:

Cool. Fewer accidental clicks all around.

But wait. I said I noticed something that made me start this investigation in the first place. I was in my Gmail account reading a newsletter email from Yaro Starak and had my house hovering over one of the ads that Gmail shows and noticed it has a different clickable area:

So wait a second. Google still gets to use the big clickable email on ads that they display on Gmail. And then they put those ads right next to the scrollbar where people have to click to read the rest of their emails. That can’t possibly be a recipe for accidental clicks.

But I’m sure Google has something in place to determine which of those clicks were accidental and return that money to the advertisers.

Have you read you Google AdSense Optimization Report for May yet? You know, the tips that Google is providing to help each of us make a little more money with their ads.

My optimization tip for May 2007 is:

You may be filtering ads that monetize well on your site.

Thank you Google. I may in fact be doing that, but a quick review of my filter list confirms that I am completely happy with none of those sites advertising on any of mine whether they monetize well on my site or not.

For the record, that was the April tip as well. Apparently they really don’t think my filter is a good idea.

Has anybody received any different tips or are they just pumping that same tip out to everybody each month?

Google pushed out the page rank update the other day. Page rank is such a funny concept. It doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in how high a site shows up in the search results. I’m not sure what Google really gets out of having the page rank be public.

One area where it does play a very large factor is with advertising. Sites are willing to pay more for links from sites with higher page rank. It is a pricing factor in both Text Link Ads and Review Me and I’m sure plenty of others.

I find that all very amusing since Google really doesn’t like buying text link ads for improving page rank. They claim to be fine with buying text link ads for improving traffic or branding for a site but, let’s face it, the three are all blended so tightly into one that Google really just hates text link ads. They have trouble figuring out what to do with them in their algorithms.

So, back to the update. What happened in my little web empire?

Be A Good Dad dropped from 5 to 4. I got a little lazy with the site over the last couple months so I wasn’t really surprised by this but I still think I was hosed.

Kalbzayn’s World stayed at PR 4. This is my oldest site by almost a year. It doesn’t get linked to much anymore but it has had a couple pretty good links and it does seem that age helps with PR.

Talk Hawkeyes rose from 3 to 4. I did a little flurry of posting during the football bowl season and then another flurry during the NCAA tournament but the rest of the time this site was horribly neglected. I have no idea why that site has a PR anywhere near the previous two.

Wallet Advice is my first real attempt to create a site entirely in the hopes of making a couple bucks off of it. It isn’t going well since this site is almost always neglected. It did manage to rise from PR 0 to PR 2 but I think that is entirely just from linking to it from my other blogs.

Webby Thoughts. That’s where you are right now. It is now a PR 4. I believe it was PR 3 before the update. I’ve also been neglecting this site pretty badly but it did manage to get a couple of good for PR links.

Nut Has A Squirrel is my newest site. I just started it last month so it is still PR 0. I started doodling little single panel comics in my notebook recently and also started exploring and finding new-to-me webcomics. So, I decided to start one of my own as a neat little hobby. I’ve always wanted to sit down and practice learning how to draw and figured this would be a good way to force me to do it. It is great fun but I still am trying to decide whether to draw on paper and scan them or just create them entirely on the computer. This site is definitely for fun with no expectation of ever making money. It is also my first site not hosted on GoDaddy.

So what do I do with all of this now? Who knows? PR really isn’t one of those things that I think about that much. I have no idea why Be A Good Dad would rank dramatically higher than the other three PR 4 blogs.

None of my new PR 4 sites have been invited into Text Link Ads yet (I submitted them a while back and Text Link Ads rechecks all sites on the waiting list every month).

The drop in Be A Good Dad was a bit of a kick in the pants to get me motivated to start paying more attention to all of the sites so maybe we’ll have good news when the next update happens. I’d much prefer for the extra work I’m planning to turn into more traffic though.

I found out today that Google is working on another PR update.

I have a blog that is getting a little bit of traffic that talks about my kids and my thoughts on parenting.  I started it just as a way of constantly reminding myself to think about being a decent parent.  I started the site a few months back and it was too young for the last PR update to affect it.

This time, according to the PR checkers, it appears that I went from a 0 to a 5.  Wow.  We’ll see where it is sitting when everything settles down in a couple days.

The site has also managed to get indexed pretty well by Google and is starting to bring in a decent amount of AdSense money.  It took me over a year to get my first check for earnings through last November.  Now, it looks like later today, I will break the $100 barrier for December and so far this month.

This makes me pretty happy.  It is nice to get to the point where I can do this hobby for free and make some pizza money.  Now, with the new PR update, I’m going to try and get the site accepted into Text Link Ads program to see if I can manage to get another way of making a few bucks off of the site.

In a way, I wish another one of my blogs had been the one to get popular instead.  BeAGoodDad is my baby.  It is my most personal site by far.

All of the other blogging I do is much more hobby based.  I enjoy learning about how blogs work and how the money side, both inbound and outbound, works.  I’m looking forward to someday taking the time to learn to write my own CSS and how to pick a get hosting plan.  The topics that I write about are of interest to me, but they are not my family.

 On the plus side, it is very rewarding to have a site that I care so much for actually be the one that is doing the best.

I’m am a Google Reader Convert and fan. I love the look and feel and speed and accessibility of Google Reader. I just does the things I need a feed reader to do.

But, there is one thing that I love about Bloglines that I could never figure out how to do in Google Reader. When you scroll through posts in Google Reader, it automatically marks them read. I like that.

I could not figure out how to mark them unread which I frequently used to do with Bloglines.

Like a lot of these kinds of issues, it was my problem. I never took the time to figure it out even though it was right there in front of me. At the bottom of each post, right smack dab in the middle, there is a “Mark as read” check box. If it has been checked it means you have read the post. If you uncheck it, it means you have not.

I don’t know how I want several months without noticing that. So, once again, Google Reader does exactly what I need a feed reader to do. I still like Bloglines and have no issues with it, but the Google Reader just feels a little easier and more convenient for me.

Tags: Google Reader, Bloglines, Mark post as unread