Marketing Pilgrim

Woke up this morning to find DavidNaylor.co.uk had been hacked and defaced. I don’t see any malicious code being inserted, only this note shown below replacing of all pages. Hopefully nothing more than the blog was affected and he is able to get the previous contents back up. I am wondering if this is the same person as before or just another random idiot.

Haxed hahahahahah

Black hat this, ****.

Update: Per comments by DaveN below, the site was moved and not hacked. He just enjoys humorous placeholder pages.

I see questions pop up in the forums every once in awhile with people asking if images that are linked to a website count as links. A link is a link so the answer would be yes. But what about images that are not surrounded by link (a href) tags. Can an image on it’s own count as a link? Well according to Yahoo Site Explorer they do.

I was reading a magazine the other day when I came across an article on JangoMail. Liking what I read I went to check them out. Being the SEO freak I am I had to check their backlinks even though my visit had nothing to do with SEO. Does anyone else here suffer from that disorder?

Back in April Marketing Pilgrim reported Google was allowing select advertisers access to a new report named “Placement Performance.” It appears Google is as of today starting the official roll out of this report to all of it’s Adwords advertisers. The Placement Performance Report details the specifics of your ads running through the adsense network.

From the official Google release:

In an ongoing effort to provide more transparency to advertisers, Google announced today the availability of a new AdWords report, called a Placement Performance report, which enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more visibility into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives. Designed in response to advertisers’ requests, Placement Performance reports offer advertisers both increased transparency and greater control over their contextual advertising, which ultimately leads to more relevant ads for users.

What would happen to your business if you suddenly died in an accident? Would if fall apart or run smoothly in another persons hands?

Being Memorial Day I was thinking about our troops when it it dawned on me that out of the thousands of reservists who are now active duty, many own their own businesses and some probably own online businesses. What did they do when called up?

Whether it’s in relation to death or just incapacity to oversee day to day operations, we all need a plan to make sure our businesses are self sufficient and can provide for our families future. Here’s a good start for such a plan.

1. Create a will and a living will outlining my desires for the business.

It looks like someone over at the Googleplex has changed their mind about arbitrage as a business model. JenSense is reporting that Google Adsense is disabling accounts of people producing made for Adsense (MFA) and arbitrage sites.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts… and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.

There is a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the issue where people who received the email admit running MFA and arbitrage sites. One person mentions making $70,000 a month so Google is not just targeting the little guy.

Ask recently announced plans to roll out contextual advertising to compete with the Google and Yahoo. Of course one of the big questions is whether Ask would have any innovations in the field or would it just be an Adsense copy cat?

While not earth shattering, it does appear Ask has managed to create something unique called Related Search Ads. Self Made Minds is the first webmaster I have seen report the new ad format. It’s similar to Google’s link unit with a few differences.

• There are a lot more links with the Ask ads compared to Google link units.
• The links open up in a new window and take users directly to an actual Ask.com search results page.
• Publishers are paid when surfers click on the ads in the search results.
• There are a couple of different formats including navigation bars and tag clouds.

Eric from Stone Temple Consulting has published a great interview with Adam Lasnik from Google discussing both paid links and duplicate content issues. Anytime Adam talks, I listen. He is honest and to the point unlike some from Google who prefer to say just enough to leave everyone wondering what is really going on.

Adam clears up much of the concern with the call for paid link reporting. As with any spam report, it’s not going to be used for direct action. Link reports are there to use as a benchmark when modifying the algorithm in an attempt to thwart similar spam actions.

Google has been running small checkout icons next to Adwords ads above the fold and large buttons with the sidebar ads for awhile now. They are now placing the large button next to the above the fold ads. I am seeing the large icon on all searches with all browsers so I am not sure if this is a test or something that’s permanent.

I wonder if the Paypal / Yahoo partnership prompted the change. Information arms race anyone? Or maybe it’s in response to dropping CTR rates.