Tag Archives: Google

Google, Adsense, and Splogging

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Reports of cancelled accounts while sploggers earn money by scraping honest bloggers’ content is troubling.

Jim Mitchell lost his AdSense account and Google won’t tell him why. He’s bitter about it. But what makes him more bitter is that he’s discovered that sploggers with AdSense accounts have been using his content to earn revenue.

From Is Google AdSense Really Fair? on JimMitchell.org:

Today, I found four different sites that have scraped my content to use as their own with AdSense ads on the page. This, according to the Google AdSense Terms of Service, is a huge violation. I promptly reported the abuse with hopes the sploggers who lifted my content get their income generating plug pulled pronto.

One of the commenters to Jim’s post claims his AdSense account was also cancelled for no reason.

Now I’ve had no trouble with Google or AdSense and hope I never do. My earnings are meager, but they do cover the cost of hosting, which is my primary goal for including AdSense ads on this site. (That’s one of the reasons I don’t plaster the site with advertising like so many other bloggers do.)

But I do have a serious problem with sploggers, especially if they’re using AdSense or other advertising programs to earn money by illegally using the content written by other bloggers.

I know my content is scraped. Every once in a while, I’ll get a pingback from a sloppy splogger that directs me to his site. The site is full of scraped content and not much else. Most of the ones I’ve seen seem to be link farms for some other purpose. I don’t know enough about this stuff to understand why my content is being scraped when there doesn’t appear to be ads on the site my content is appearing on. (Perhaps someone reading this can explain or include a link to a good explanation.) But if these sloppy sploggers are stealing content in a way that can be easily traced, how many other sploggers are stealing content in a way that can’t be easily traced?

And do they all have Google AdSense accounts?

Which brings up a good question: how does Google determine who qualifies for an AdSense account? Is there a human who actually looks at the sites? I seriously doubt that. So that makes me wonder how effective their software is at determining whether a site is legitimate — full of fresh, legally obtained content — or a ripoff of other bloggers’ hard work.

And that also brings up the question of the effectiveness of an Adwords account. I was using Adwords for Flying M Air in an effort to sell my multi-day excursions. While I’m no Adwords expert, I think I had it set up well. I know I was paying for a ton of hits. But I also know that my phone didn’t ring. While this might mean that people don’t want the service I’m offering — chances are, they get sticker shock out when they see the price — it also might mean that the clicks aren’t being made by serious customers — or even by humans.

But it also means that my Adwords payments might be going to sploggers who have built sites to draw in visitors who then click on my link. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if they were buying — one sale would pay my Adwords bill for a year — but they’re not. So I could be paying, through my Adwords account, for sploggers to steal content from honest bloggers, some of whom, according to Jim Mitchell, have had their AdSense accounts yanked for reasons never explained.

I guess what I want to know is this:

  • Why does Google cancel the AdSense accounts for certain bloggers who claim they have done nothing wrong, then refuse to explain why they were cancelled?
  • How does Google ensure that AdSense accounts are given only to legitimate sites — and not to sploggers or other copyright violators?
  • How can Google Adwords customers be assured that their ads are appearing on legitimate sites and are being clicked by humans who are genuinely interested in the products or services advertised?

I hope Jim gets his AdSense account back. And I hope that other bloggers do their best to report feed scraping and splogging activities to Google or other ad sourcers whenever it’s found.

How Many Sites Link to Yours?

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Let Google tell you.

We all know that Google’s bots index our sites regularly. They collect all kinds of information for Google’s excellent search features. But while they’re indexing, they also collect information about links. And while they’re checking my site, they’re also checking other sites — and building a database of the sites that link to mine.

All this information is available to Webmasters in Google’s Webmaster tools. I gave it a try today and discovered, to my pleasure and surprise, that there are currently over 4,300 links to pages on aneclecticmind.com. Not too shabby.

External Links listed in Webmaster Tools

To use this and other Webmaster Tools features, you need a Google account. Oddly enough, it can’t be the same as your AdSense account (if you have one) — at least I couldn’t use mine for that. My AdWords account info did work, however, so I used that. If you don’t have a Google or Gmail account, you’ll have to create one. You’ll be prompted to do so if you need to.

Once on the main Webmaster Tools page, you’ll be prompted to specify a URL for your site. You can enter as many Home Page URLS as you like, one at a time.

But before you can see information about links to your Web site, you’ll need to go through a verification process to prove that it’s yours. There are two ways to do this: insert a META tag on your site’s home page or upload an HTML file to your site. I choose the META tag method, inserted the tag, saved the modified home page file, and clicked a verify button. In seconds, Google checked the page and completed the verification process. I could then view the stats for my site.

The Webmaster tools stats include a wealth of information about your site, links to it, and how Google indexes it. Although I think there’s room for improvement, this free tool from a search engine giant is plenty useful. If you’re a Webmaster or blogger, I highly recommend checking it out.

You can learn more about the links feature of Google’s Webmaster tools in “Discover Your Links” on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Blog for Money?

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Yeah. Right.

Today I had my last correspondence with the folks at yet another blog-for-money Web site.

It’s a new trend. Someone with a server and bandwidth and a Google Adsense account starts a multi-blog site. They lure in bloggers who’d like to be paid for their blogging efforts. They get these people to contribute original content to the blogs, which are just jam-packed with Google Adsense ads, and sit back to collect the revenue, giving a portion of the proceeds to these bloggers.

They tell you up front that you’re paid based on the ad revenue earned by your blog or topic or “channel.” They even admit that you won’t get 100% of the money. Sometimes they hint at how much you could earn. They always tell you how little work you’ll have to do.

You sign up and go at it, meeting your obligations. But because the blog is poorly promoted, no one visits except your fellow bloggers. And they don’t click ad links. And let’s face it: blog readers have lots of blogs to read. Launching a new blog by yourself is no small feat, especially when the blog’s format is set in stone and obviously created to display the maximum number of ads.

So there’ s no revenue on the 50-100 hits you can expect each week.

The end result: a complete waste of your time.

I know this firsthand. I bought into one of these schemes and almost bought into another. Fortunately, the first one taught me a lesson. (Too bad I came up with such a nice domain name for these folks to register.) The one I worked for had more window real estate dedicated to ads than content. That should have been a good hint at what it was all about. I’ll be clearing out all my content later this week. They can find some other sucker to add fresh content to the site.

Have you been tempted or even lured in by one of these schemes? If so, I’d like to hear from you. Use the Comments link to tell your tale. You don’t need to get specific with domain names or other details. But you can if you like. Just let the rest of us know what’s out there.

digg IT

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A new plugin being tested here.

Although I have my doubts about digg, I’ve always been curious about whether my posts have ever been “dugg.” I’ve often seen buttons with digg counts on other WordPress Web sites. I figured it was time to try installing one on this site.

digg what?

digg, in case you don’t know, is a social bookmarking site that’s pretty popular among blog enthusiasts. You sign up for a free membership, then “digg” blog posts you like. If the post has never been dugg, you can be the first to digg it. Otherwise, you can just add your digg to the count of existing diggs. You can also add comments about the post.

Posts with lots of diggs — generally more than 100 — get lots of visits, mostly from people who monitor popular posts on the digg site. So, for a blogger, being dugg could be a good thing.

I say could be because if you’ve got a lot of diggs, your post could become so popular that hits exceed your bandwidth. That happened with podiobooks.com, which I learned about today. A note on its site says:

We’ve been Dugg and Lifehacked in the last 24 hours, and the site is experiencing a little oddness from time to time. We’re working on getting things stabilized.

That’s when you can get the site. You’re just as likely to get a Server Error 500 when you attempt to access. Oops. Hopefully, things will calm down for them enough for their server to handle incoming requests.

The Plugin

Getting the digg button on a post is a matter of installing a plugin and modifying the WordPress theme’s template code to add a new function.

I needed to find the plugin, so I used by friend Google to search for digg wordpress plugin.

I first found Digg This, which was at the top of the list. I wasted no time downloading and installing it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work. And when I scrolled through the list of comments, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one.

I decided to keep looking.

I then found digg IT (which may have been called Digg This in a previous incarnation). I downloaded and installed it. It worked immediately, perfectly. If I’m still using it as you read this, you’ll see it at the top right of each post.

(I say if because I might not keep it. Although it works like a charm, seeing so many posts with 0 diggs is kind of depressing. I have a post that’s been read over 3,000 times and still has 0 diggs. [sigh] You can help cheer me up by occasionally digging my posts.)

The installation required a single line of code to be inserted in The Loop, right before the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag:

< ?php if(function_exists(digg_this)) { digg_this('', '', '', ''); } ?>

It’s a nice piece of code because it checks to make sure the function exists before actually calling it. So if the plugin fails or is not compatible with a future version of WordPress, your site visitors won’t see an error message. I like neat code like that.

Unfortunately, the documentation does have a tiny error. It tells you to insert the code in your index.php file. If the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag for your theme isn’t in that file, those instructions could confuse you. In my case, that tag is in my post.php file. So you do need to have a little knowledge about your theme’s template files to install it properly. Just open them all up until you find the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag and you can’t go wrong.

Anyway, if you’re posts are dugg or you want them dugg, you might want to give this plugin a try. You can’t beat it for ease of installation and use.

March 26 Update: I removed the digg count from my pages. The zeros were really getting to me. If the site ever starts getting diggs on a more regular basis, I’ll put it back. For now, the code is just commented out.

Using Google AdSense Channels

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Article now available on Informit.com.

My latest Informit.com article, “Using Google AdSense Channels” is now online.

From the article’s intro (written by editors, not me):

Google’s AdSense program is a very popular advertising option for blogs and web sites because it’s easy to use and can generate revenue with minimal effort. Maria Langer explains how to use the Channels features in AdSense to track which of your ads are earning the most revenue.

This article should be of special interest to bloggers and traditional Web site webmasters who try to raise revenue using the Google AdSense products.

There are two other Informit articles in the pipeline. Keep checking in; I’ll let you know when they’re released. Or check my Informit.com books and articles page for yourself to see what’s new.