August 23, 2007 – 2:17 pm
Numerous blogs report receiving an e-mail today from TLA containing the following text:
As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:
Homepage URL
http://tinyurl.com/….
Starter Promo URL
http://tinyurl.com/….
** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!
It’s a blatant attempt to allow bloggers to try to hide their affiliation with TLA, for fear of Google penalization. Nice try, but it’s a desperate move that won’t work. The fact that they’re directly recommending that their customers try and hide that relationship says a lot though.
This is starting to get fun to watch, in a sick way.
August 16, 2007 – 10:44 am
In a follow-up to the articles I posted earlier (first, second), it appears that Google has begun to penalize sites for selling PageRank via text links, and TLA specifically. [More detail, from the site in question...]
Also, as I feared / predicted, Google gave NO warning to the site owner before the penalization took effect, and there is no telling when (or if) the ranking will be restored.
In theory there is nothing else I can do right now. Just sit back and wait until a Google revisor sees my request, evaluates it and puts the site back in the search results.
According to what I have read in forums yesterday this can easily take several weeks if not months.
And this is where my heart crumbles. Without Google visitors, my revenues are 1/4 or less than our average monthly gross income. Without them I can’t pay my office space, editors, writers, webmaster or server space, let alone my own monthly expenses and the taxes I am due at the end of the month.
It is a tough situation.
Some may accuse Google of violating their famous “don’t be evil” position by taking this zero tolerance approach. While I agree that they should have at least given notice and the opportunity for self-correction, at the same time selling links in this manner has always been against Google’s ranking policies, and all they’re really doing is more consistently enforcing that policy.
WP developer Mark Jaquith recently posted his thoughts on the Text Link Ads issue, and I’m inclined to agree with him.
When you really think about it, it’s no better than any of the other spam techniques widely despised by the internet community, and this was the reason I personally decided to drop them recently.
Whether you agree or not is, in a way, irrelevant, because I think the day is coming when text link ads (for the purpose of gaming PageRank) will no longer profitable, because I do believe that Google will eventually start penalizing sites that sell links in this manner.
I’m still interested to hear what higher profile bloggers who have been involved with TLA for a long time (like Alex King) have to say on the matter, but so far I haven’t seen anything.
It was fun while it lasted.
OK, maybe not “fun” necessarily, but maybe “satisfying”, in that it was nice to make enough money off my blog to cover the cost of my VPS hosting plan plus a bit of extra spending money every now and then. But, alas, as of right now, I’m ending that relationship, despite the fact that it’s been relatively good so far.
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Carbon neutrality by end of 2007 - From the Google Blog
Climate change continues to be one of the biggest, most challenging problems our planet faces, and we know that a sustained global effort is needed if we’re going to have any hope of reversing its effects. In that spirit, today we’re announcing that Google will become carbon neutral by the end of 2007. This is an important step in our long-term pursuit of holistic environmental solutions.
Our plan to neutralize Google’s carbon footprint includes three basic strategies:
- reduce energy consumption by maximizing efficiency;
- invest in and use renewable energy sources; and
- purchase carbon offsets for the emissions that we can’t reduce directly.
To calculate our carbon footprint, we took into account emissions from purchased electricity, employee commuting, business travel, construction, and server manufacturing. In a partnership with the Environmental Resources Trust (ERT), we have independently verified this assessment, and will do so every year.
In order to meet our short-term goal of carbon neutrality, we have decided to purchase some carbon offsets. To be clear, we see carbon offsets not as a permanent solution but rather as a temporary tool which allows us to take full responsibility for our impact right away. By investing in projects elsewhere in the world that cut the overall amount of greenhouse gases, we can help reduce climate impact now while we develop more sustainable strategies for the future.
The recent talk of Google Gears reminded me again about an aspect of it with a lot of potential.
In addition to the local storage system that enables offline access, it also provides a WorkerPool API for performing script tasks in multiple processes, allowing for much more responsive asynchronous operations. This is a pretty big deal if you’ve ever done any AJAX programming and been frustrated with the limitations of javascript running in the browser.
I once had to do something similar to this with an online support application I was creating. This was several years before the term “AJAX” came around, but it was using the techniques that have now become known as “AJAX” to enable features like chat, etc. to be included in a support request system. The issue with only using regular javascript came about because the interface for the help desk people had to allow them to carry on multiple conversations at once, manage an incoming queue of support requests, and transfer or conference other help desk agents (from a list of available ones) into the chat. Because it was doing so much, using plain javascript was getting a bit slow, since browser implementations of javascript do not have access to multiple processes or threads, so you can only really do one thing at a time while everything else waits.
I ended up moving a lot of the code behind the agent UI into a java applet which would allow multithreaded processing, while the “client” part (people making the requests) just stuck with plain old XmlHttpRequest because that was all they needed and it was best not to require Java on the client side.
It will be interesting to see some apps start to take advantage of the WorkerPool for more complex and more responsive AJAX-ish UIs. I imagine it will be used in this manner primarily for internal “web applications” or just to add extra (non-critical) functionality into sites that have a broader audience, since I don’t think any sites will be able to “require” Gears for core functionality because I don’t see most people installing it. I could see this pushing browser makers towards implementing something like this directly into the browsers themselves, though, so that it’s available for everyone.
I wonder if they haven’t publicized this because they don’t want even more people thinking of them as big-brother-ish…
When you add &imgtype=face to the picture search string [using Google image search], only photos with faces are showing up. This feature has not been officially announced yet and I have no idea how reliable it works.
For example:
Regular image search for “Ventura” - Same search with “&imgtype=face” on the end of the URL
I read about Google Gears earlier today on the blog of the developer who has been working on it, but I couldn’t think of anything I’d want to use it for, so I didn’t bother checking into it too much further.
Now that Google Reader supports it, though, I have installed it and it is excellent. Reader is the perfect type of application for this product.
So Google has rolled out a new service to protect its users from malicious software. The basic idea is that if Google has identified a particular site as being a host to viruses or other harmful content, they won’t actually give you a real link to those sites if they appear in your search results. Instead, clicking on the link takes you to a warning page that explains that they have deemed the page dangerous. If the user really wants to go there, they’ll have to copy and paste the URL. (screenshots are available in the link above, in case you don’t want to do any “questionable” searches on your own computer just to see what it looks like).
I have mixed feelings about it. For the most part, it will be a very valuable service to most users, so overall it’s obviously a good thing. The only part I don’t like is that it doesn’t seem like they’re very transparent with why a particular site is put on the naughty list. I understand that they can’t go into too much detail for fear of giving too much inside info away to people trying to game the system, but it would be nice if they at least tagged the entries with generalities that would indicate the nature of the threat from that particular page, or (even better, but less likely) more technical details about the specific potential for harm.
I thought that Jeff Atwood (author of the article linked above) raised another interesting question on this matter as well: for some sites (specifically those related to teaching people how to cheat Google’s ranking system) don’t get listed in the results at all, whereas these sites which are actually dangerous (in contrast to the former) are still listed. I’d like to see them at least be consistent, but I wouldn’t want them to err on the side of not listing the sites they consider “bad” either, so the only option I’d really be OK with would be for them to use this newer method on all sites they wish to discriminate against. Obviously, they won’t do that, since they want/need to try to prevent people from seeing those SEO cheats.
January 21, 2007 – 9:02 am
I almost forgot to go back and give Google props for fixing this. It’s great to know that Google is the kind of company that’s not afraid to acknowledge their mistakes and correct them.