Caydel’s SEO Blog

About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post ‘Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword‘. In it, I made the suggestion based upon an article posted by EGOL at SEOmoz that in order to prevent certain types of ads from showing, Google should allow us to set negative keywords for the Adsense ads on a site.

In the comments, Joost de Valk informed us that Google is indeed beta-testing such a program, and that he is actually part of the limited beta-test.

I know for a fact that Google is testing with negative keywords like that, since I have been testing it myself

I can’t tell to much, except that i was given the possibility to give a series of terms for which they broad matched and didn’t show ads. And no, no release date…

That is extremely encouraging - I can’t wait for this feature to be released to the general public. There are some categories of ads that I would *really* like to see banished from my site (such as the $0.07 CPM ads Google is running advertising Adwords and Adsense). I think that this toold could really help Google - I think the publishers know what is on their site better than Google does. It seems every day I see ads which are close to a good match, yet still manage to miss the point of the page entirely, and thus result in unsatisfactory, off-topic ads which probably don’t get the CTR they should.

Plus, this would be great for people who have definitions of ‘family friendly’ that are perhaps more stringent than those of Google. I don’t really want to see seduction tips and other crocks advertised on my site, regardless of what one or two keywords I may have that might trigger those ads.

What do you think?

So, the holidays are over and we’re all back at work.

Fun, isn’t it?

My nose is back to the grindstone today again, which isn’t so bad, actually. Over the holidays, Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Ed. came in from Amazon, so I’ve spent the day so far reading through the book.

You know how sometimes you find a real gem of a book? I am amazed by how great this book is - things are laid out clearly, Dave Thomas has a great style and strategy for getting across what a Rails developer needs to know. Within a few hours of reading, I already had a few pages of notes written down concerning things I could have been doing better with my Rails coding.

I am not approaching this book as a complete beginner, of course. I have done quite a bit of work in Rails before. I had already worked through David Black’s , which is also an excellent book. The two books together complement eachother in style and approach.

So, in short, if you are a Rails programmer and you haven’t already purchased it, go out and get your hands on this book - it will definately give you a much better understanding of Rails. The new edition has been heavily updated for the coming release of Rails 1.2, so it will be a good reference for future releases of Rails!

BTW, if someone wants to get me Rails Recipes… *wink*

Yesterday, my wife and I were out shopping for Christmas presents for our nephews and nieces. We went into Toys-R-Us in order to see what we could find. Looking at all the rows and rows of toys available for kids, a couple thoughts came to me:

Every parent has an innate fear that their kid is going to be anything less than the intellectual elite for their age group. No parent wants that - it reflects poorly on them! (Yes, I know, slightly cynical…)

Toy makers know this, and to that end have done everything in their power to create a marketable ‘educational aspect’ to every toy they make.

• ‘Baby’s First Mobile - teaches shapes, colours, counting, arithmetic and discrete mathematics. Ages 6-24 months’

Ok, the example above is somewhat exaggerated. But I am sure you understand the kind of marketing I am referring to. They are marketing to parents who want to justify to themselves that they are intellectually stimulating their children and providing for their intellectual development when then leave them in a corner somewhere because they are too busy with their own lives to care for their children before they are old enough for daycare.

At any rate, ranting and cynicism aside, many SEOs have children. So what type of toys would be appropriate to develop the skills necessary for SEO work in their children from a young age?

• Link it! - a fun game where players must link together a network of websites. Watch out for those spamlinks! Ages 3-6
• Baby’s First Adsense Heatmap - train your child to instinctively determine the best ad placement. 0-18 months
• Keywords! - Develop long tail keywords. The player with the longest list wins! 6-12 years
• Plush Silky Matt Cutts Doll - Give your child someone to take comfort in and suck on when everything is bad.
• Mechanical Spider & Web - Hang on your wall! Watch the thread color change as the Spider assigns trust! 3-6 years
• Google Dance Party for the Xbox 360 - Teach your child the unpredictable steps of the Google Dance!

Ok, those were poor - what can you come up with?

I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

6 months have gone by, and this blog seems to have begun to develop. Thanks to all the commentators who have taken the time to give feedback and their own views on certain issues - your input is very much appreciated. Thanks to my subscribers out there - I can see on my stats that there are a lot of you pulling in my feed. I doubt I ever feel motivated to write at all if I didn’t know you were somewhat interested in what I had to say.

As a thank you to all of you who have commented, I have removed the ‘nofollow’ attribute from all the comment links. Since you are putting work into the comments that you leave here, you should recieve some type of reward out of it!

Once again, thank you to you all. Have a Merry Christmas!

EGOL recently made a post on the SEOmoz blog about one of the major shortcomings of Adsense: the lack of a feature to set negative keywords for the contextual ad matching. In short, EGOL is having a problem where many of the contextual ads showing on a few of his sites are not family friendly, leaving him with a poor image when people associate him with these ads.

EGOL’s issue is that while his sites are family friendly, some of his ads are not. Since most visitors do not understand the nature of contextual ads, they would have no choice but to consider him personally responsible for the smut ads Google is giving him. I also see a use for functionality such as this; most SEO types who would be visiting this blog probably aren’t to motivated to purchase ‘Get Rich Quick With Adsense’ ebooks and MFA templates. Knowing this, I could probably largely increase my Click Through Rate by eliminating these ads altogether.

Domain filtering can only go so far; I am sure that I could spend all day placing domains in the contextual ad filter, and I would never be able to remove all the Adwords and Adsense oriented ads showing up in the units to the right of this page. Yet it would be helpful if I could just set those as negative keywords in the Adsense control panel, and not have to worry about them.

What do you think? Would this be a useful feature? I am curious to hear from more people on this. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, we may see the Adsense team implement this type of functionality.

I may be a day behind the rest of the blogosphere in reporting this, but Search Engine Journal’s 2006 Search Blog Awards are open for vote. The categories up for vote this year are:

• SEO Blog of the Year
• Search News Blog
• Best Search Marketing / Contextual Ad Blog
• Best Link Building Blog
• Best Search Agency Resource Blog
• Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006
• Best Social Media Optimization Blog
• Best Black Hat SEO Blogs
• Best Local Search Blog
• Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
• Best Web 2.0 Blog
• *BONUS* Best Search Engine Marketing Community / Forum
• *BONUS 2* What’s your favorite Search Podcast?

Rather than being a ‘pick the best’ type vote, voters are asked to rate each of the nominations on a scale of 1-5, except for the ‘Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006′ category, in which you are to pick only one. Of course, if you are not familiar with the nomination, you are asked to leave it blank.

There are a large number of good blogs and bloggers on the card for each category. The two most interesting categories to watch will be the ‘Best SEO Blog of 2006′ as well as the ‘Best Search Engine Blogger of 2006′. The Best Search Blogger had about 20 names on it that I read daily; I was hard-pressed to rate them against eachother since each of the nominations does an outstanding job.

Voting will be open until December 24th. Winners will be announced some time after the holiday season is over.

Place Your Vote!

It appears that Commission Junction has shut down my account do to a lack of activity in the last couple of months. Searching around, it seems that the only solution is to sign up again with a new email account, since they don’t seem to re-activate people’s accounts.

I am giving Shoemoney’s Ebay Ads script another shot on a few of my sites. I’ve used it in the past, but not with any really spectacular results. I guess it all depends on the niche, and your visitor demographics. Yesterday, I thought of a new site idea which could capitalize big on these ads. Unfortunately, to use it I need my Ebay publisher’s ID which I can only get through my Commission Junction account….

If you are curious what this script looks like, take a look at the sidebar on the right. Currently, it *should* be showing a Google T-Shirt up for auction, although occasionally, in a show of defiance for all logic, a 3 Stooges DVD collection seems to come up for my ‘google shirt’ query. In a day or two, I may change the query to try to find some ask.com swag, or something else cool.

I have a real great idea for a new site where the Ebay ads will do great - it is a niche of collectibles in which people will purchase dozens of this item used over eBay. And the niche is small enough that a single new site in it will immediately be noticed by the community.