Updates-Link-Love-3

News

Google extends adsense to all domains.

The first major news I cam about on in my rounds this week was that Google has now extended adsense to all domains.

Now when I first read the headline of this I thought what? Though in effect what this does now is allow you to use adsense on ‘parked domains’. Thus meaning more money from you and no % going on to Sedo or other parking services.

Over at wickedfire these were the prominent views:

Adsense for domains sucks for two main reasons: you have to use your own DNS server, and there’s no contact or for-sale option on the landing page. Additional suckage: you can’t customize the page title or any of the other text on the lander, and the keyword hints don’t seem to do much of anything. For laughs I put my best-performing domain from sedo on AFD and have so far been underwhelmed.

There’s little incentive to use AFD as it’s basically a poorly designed featureless MFA anybody could put together on shared hosting, compared to the real parking services with sales tools, traffic stats, and (more importantly) let you just point domains at their nameservers.

[Chemicaljake]

I can’t agree with you more. Hit the nail right on the head mate.

Adsense for Domains is just dumb. Its not like Google Domains at all, meaning, they have the same strict and stupid rules that Adsense has, so arbitrage is tough. When you lack the flexibility of domain feeds you can pretty much kiss your revenue goodbye, especially these days with SEO being a much more important factor in domaining.

See, with a feed, you get control and much lax rules. You can cut up your feed and turn it into something that looks similar to Adsense ads, but without the strict rules. Plus you can meld it into your content, and you have full control over the pages of the domains. Meaning you can add lots of useful and unique content, SEO the shit outta the page, get ranked well, and when someone clicks on one of the paid links, not only do you make a lot of cash per click, but the advertiser gets a user with some real value, not just some clicky retard who was mildly interested in the site because they lost their way searching for the domain they originally wanted.

This whole idea is just dumb. Get rid of it. It sucks for advertisers too. Poor quality. Sucks for publishers as “fraud” is going to be rampant on this pretty fucking quickly so your rules are going to get tougher and you’ll probably get a lot of clicks charged back anyway. [Jon]

Wordpress Theme Dump

The other major news piece I came across was the fact that Wordpress pulled 200 GPL themes from their  theme section.

The reason you ask? well a first we did not know! however a quick email was later sent by Matt which said the following:

Thanks for emailing me about the theme directory. The other day I noticed a ton of bad stuff had snuck in like lots of spammy SEO links, themes whose sites said you couldn’t modify them (which is a violation of the GPL), etc. Exactly the sort of stuff the theme directory was meant to avoid.

There were also a few that violated WP community guidelines, like the domain policy. So since Monday we’ve been clearing stuff out en mass. If you’re kosher with the GPL and don’t claim or promote otherwise on your site and your theme was removed, it was probably a mistake. Give us a week to catch up with the bad stuff and then drop a note.

Thanks guys, and let me know if you have any more questions.

–
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://automattic.com

[source: Jeffro2pt0]

Now this was an interesting turn as most premium wordpress developers build their brand name etc by giving out free themes. In regards to this matter both Alister Camron and Thaya Kareeson have discussed this matter at length. The crux being though that:

The GPL (current version, if you must ask) demands that any derivative work of the WordPress codebase must be available for free. It matters not what licensing you apply to code you create that depends on WordPress code for its own functioning; it matters that you understand that it is a derivative work and that you must make it available for free.

This in relation to free themes summarised by Thay to mean

A good example of an unethical theme would be a theme that has a back link (pointing to the author’s site) in the footer and the author tells you that it is a violation to remove that back link.  This violates the freedom of modification of GPL.  Another example is premium themes selling single use and multiple use licenses.  According to GPL, you should be able to buy the “single-use” license and be able to legally use it multiple times on multiple sites

Now I am not going to debate whether this is the case or not as I myself have not read into GPL law. However if this is true then surely this is a massive blow to wordpress  /  joomla / other GPL licensed CMS premium item sites ?

Surely even the supposed ‘wordpress marketplace‘ as was suggested by Matt earlier will be on some level liable for breaches of this.

Regarding the links at the bottom which I feel is the real issue, as single/multi use is just semantics a price hike and elimination of those terms can solve that issue. Surely the author can and SHOULD be able to keep these links in if he is providing these themes for free. Even giving to charity nets you a tax deduction surely there must be SOME gain for developers to give out themes. So a term that states the link must be intact, a link that helps fund their time spent, gives them credit for thier work, surely is a reasonable request that should be enforced.

Auctions

Now I love trawling through sitepoint auctions to get an idea on how to better monetise sites, to see what works and below is one I was amazed at.

Jackbook

Jackbook.com has been listed in the premium section and why does this amaze me? Well go have a read of both the site and the listing.

This site has a revenue of 11K per month and the site itself…the design in my opinion needs a lot of work. The content is well of questionable use (reffering to the ‘latest’ area). Yet credit must be given where credit is due; he has monetised this site brilliantly; If he can get 11k from that site per month then that is a applause worthy achievement.

Links

How to ranking for a keyword

A few days ago after deciding that my onsite optimisation skills were sufficient, I decided to learn how to do off-site SEO optimisation. The first person I approached was Garry Conn who advised to head over to his new site Blogging questions and ask the question so to get a more diverse and ‘full’ reply.

The gists of the answers though was ‘links … links…and more links’.

OK I thought links is good…sounds easy..to easy what should I look out for and how should I get them?

For this I was pointed to two articles on Winning The Web;

The first on How to make each link count and the second on interviews with link building experts, in which they gave some tips.

Armed with this info I selected two articles namely ‘How to Airbrush an Image’ aiming for the keywords ‘How to Airbrush an Image in Photoshop’ and the second being ‘Adgitize – A critical look’ with the keyword being Adgitize.

The execution

The tacts I tried for both differed slightly; For the first I submitted it to two main tutorial sites (namely good-tutorials.com and tutoralized) hoping that the traffic they would send (numbered at 7k this week) would help me rank.

For ‘Adgitize – A critical look’ I tired ‘building’ some links. I submitted it to a number of social media sites and created some sites that provided targeted links.

Results

At the end of the week ( Saturday) I checked my rankings for both.

For the first article I ranked no 4 out of 658,000 and for the second I ranked 14. However if you take a look at the article that is ranked at no14 you will see it is my last Updates-Link-Love article and not the adgitize review.

A quick look and questions shows that the article is no longer in the serps though was at no 10 when it was. I am told not to worry about it, it shall return stronger then ever!

Conclusion

So in conclusion … I can’t say at the moment mainly because of the anomaly mentioned. My non-targeted article is ranking well for a keyword, so all I can out that down to is on-site optimisation.

They say it takes time for links to ‘cash in’ and as the sites I created for the second part havent been indexed yet. I think I will have to wait and see what method worked best. Though undeniably on-site optimisation is a MUST.

Automation

So here are two great pieces of code one by Digerati who has blessed this quarter of the year with 2 posts!!

He talks about how to scrape a page using curl.

The second great piece by ‘erect’ which spits out the Site Title and Meta details for any urls thrown at it.

and so I end this Behmoth of an update post with an image that captures the latest politcal news (with a WoW twist).

Popularity: 12% [?]

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