What does this Google Algorithm update mean?

With the dawning of this new algorithm if you place your ads in a ‘Google approved’ way then your site will do better in search results. If you choose to do things in a way that Mr Google disapproves of then your site will drop down the rankings.

It seems that carefully considered ad placement is the new SEO (lets call it AD SEO for short) and should now be an integral part of your overall SEO strategy.

What exactly is good AD SEO?

Of course Mr Google isn’t giving away the exact secret sauce for his algorithm update (he never does) so we have to read between the lines.

Lets start with these quotes from the Google Page Layout Algorithm post…

“an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”

So from this we could infer what Mr Google is looking for is to see how much real content can be viewed as soon as a visitor lands on a page.

“Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.”

This seems to be the crux of the matter. Google does not want you to fill the ‘above the fold’ part of your site with ads, or at least not to the extent that it affects user experience.

How Many Ads Are Too Much?

Google does not draw a line in the sand to tell us exactly ‘how much is too much’. We are left to guess. Of course Google is in the ad business, so if common sense is prevailing at Google HQ then they wont be intentionally targetting well put together original content sites that include ads at the top of the page. We can be reasonably assured that ads above the fold are still okay. Its just that we now have to be mindful when Mr Google says…

“This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page”

and…

“This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.”

But what exactly does ‘above-the-fold’ mean in this case? Lets see what clues they give us…

The Browser Size Tool

Notice if we scan down the post towards the end they mention the Browser Size Tool. So we could infer that if our content looks good when viewed in this way and is not ureasonably impeded by ads then we are hopefully staying on the straight and narrow.

Lets look at an example of one of my sites using the Browser Size Tool. Its worth noting that when I check the rankings of this particular site for the keywords I’m targetting I notice no loss of ranking at all since the update.

As you can see this site has plenty of ads above the fold, but 98% of visitors can see the first line of real content and 95% can see the whole first paragraph. There are still a couple of ads here above the fold though, and in my view its not excessive, no more so than most blogs which monetize using ads.

So because I’ve seen no ranking change, I’ll assume this is okay AD SEO-wise and within Google’s normal parameters.

Future AD SEO placement design considerations

Ad placement designs that I’ll be avoiding from now on are the ones in which the entire above-the-fold content is taken up with ads, and I’ll be drawing an arbitrary line in the sand of 98% in the Google Browser Size Tool for the first line of real content. I’ll also be limiting the number of ads I have above the fold to the ones that count such as a single large rectangle ad or a large banner ad. Also I’ll be thinking even more carefully about in-content below the fold ad placement. These are just my initial preferences but it would seem to me that a commonsense approach will win the day in this case, striking a balance between Search Engine ranking and Ad visibility.

Orginal post is from HeatmapThemes

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. Unlike other link shrinking services like tinyurl, budurl, and bit.ly, this plugin allows you to create shortlinks coming from your own domain! Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to mask their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, increase the reach of their website by spreading these links via Twitter, forums or comments on other blogs.

Features

• Gives you the ability to create clean, simple URLs on your website that redirect to any other URL
• Generates random 2-3 character slugs for your URL or allows you to name a custom slug for your URL
• Tracks the Number of Hits per link
• Tracks the Number of Unique Hits per link
• Provides a reporting interface where you can see a configurable chart of clicks per day. This report can be filtered by the specific link clicked, date range, and/or unique clicks.
• View click details including ip address, remote host, browser (including browser version), operating system, and referring site
• Download hit details in CSV format
• Intuitive Javascript / AJAX Admin User Interface
• Pass custom parameters to your scripts through pretty link and still have full tracking ability
• Ability to rewrite these custom Parameters before forwarding to Target URL
• Setup Pretty Links as Tracking Pixels and track impressions
• Exclude IP Addresses from Stats
• Enables you to post your Pretty Links to Twitter directly from your WordPress admin
• Enables you to send your Pretty Links via Email directly from your WordPress admin
• Select Temporary (307) or Permanent (301) redirection for your Pretty Links
• Cookie based system for tracking visitor activity across hits
• Organize Links into Groups
• Create nofollow/noindex links
• Turn tracking on / off on each link
• Keep users on your site even when being redirected by using the PrettyBar which stays at the top of the page
• Configure the PrettyBar to mirror the look and feel of your website

Great things you can do with Pretty Link

• Clean up / mask affiliate links or merchant shopping cart links
• Track the effectiveness of email campaigns by embedding Pretty Links in your emails
• See how many times an email is opened by creating a “Tracking Pixel” Pretty Link and embedding it in the email
• Kickstart and Fuel the SEO on your site by posting Pretty Links from your site on Digg, Twitter, Facebook, other blogs and everywhere else on the Internet.
• Create Pretty Links for private special offers (to your email list) using a randomized slug to prevent the URL from being “guessed”
• Write custom scripts in PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP or anything else that accept parameters and use Pretty Link to make their URLs “pretty” and forward on the parameters
• Setup pretty links for your zip, pdf & binary files and track how many times they are downloaded
• Use to track results of your PPC campaigns by setting your ads to go to Pretty Links
• Track Everything!

Seriously, look how great this plugin is:

Getting started with Affiliate Royale is simple

Starting an affiliate program for your products can be confusing. You can get roped into some stiff fees when you outsource your Affiliate Program or use a 3rd party hosted solution—and there are some significant technical challenges with setting up a self-hosted affiliate program that actually works with your shopping cart. With both of these types of solutions it can be difficult if not impossible to use your company’s look and feel.

These challenges prevent many merchants from starting an affiliate program at all.

An affiliate program should be straight forward to get working. What you need is a place for your affiliates to manage their account, for you to manage your affiliates and a way to connect your affiliate program to your shopping cart.

Affiliate Royale is better for your business than 3rd party hosted affiliate program services because you don’t have to pay monthly for it or a percentage for each affiliate transaction.

Affiliate Royale is better for your business than traditional self-hosted solutions because it’s so easy to setup, uses the look and feel of your website and seamlessly integrates with your WordPress admin.

Heatmap Theme  now comes with lots of additional features which make it easier to create ‘niche site style blogs’ – so that means the ability to go ‘minimal’ with less distractions for visitors.

You can see the latest  update in action on  http://heatmaptheme.com/ – notice how some elements have been turned off to give a simpler cleaner look, with the sidebar switched from right to left.

Sidebar Switching

You can now switch the whole sidebar left or right for maximum heatmap experimentation. Pop your ads in the fabled top-left hot-zone with ease!

Hide the Page navigation and Categories navigation bars

You can now entirely switch off the Page Nav and Categories Nav bars!

Hide the RSS Icons and Links

Want your categories to go the full width of the cat nav bar? Then you can by switching off the RSS Icons and links.

New RSS Icons Widget

If you switch off the RSS Icons you can still have them in your sidebar using this new widget.

Hide the Search Box

You can eliminate the search box so your page nav can go to the full width of the theme. There is of course a Search widget should you still need that function to pop in your sidebar.

Hide Post Details

Going for a minimalist neat look? You can now turn off all the post details for every post on the home page, posts, pages, categories, search and archives.

Footer Bars

You can switch them off too!

Bugs and slight annoyances fixed

• The theme now comes rounded corners for the default inbuilt classic graphite style – you could only get those in child themes previously.
• I moved the search in the nav bar 1px downwards just to make it look a little better in Firefox.
• I noticed that the post details box for each post was out by about 5px. I’ve fixed that up in the CSS.
• The (EDIT) link for each post has now been moved out of the post details box and underneath the POST it relates to. This is of course required because you now have the option to switch off the post details and therefore would not be able to (EDIT) the post unless I changed this!
• Removed the pesky NO CATEGORIES message on the cat bar when you have no categories in your blog – some people dont have any categories in their blogs – go figure!
• Removed the pesky NO POSTS message when you have no posts in your blog – giving you the option to just have a site entirely made up of pages!
• Fixed various low-importance minor typo issues.

Members Release

As of this version, the latest release of Heatmap Theme will always be a members download.

Additionally I will also be making a ‘free to download’ earlier version available, for those who want to give Heatmap Theme a whirl before joining our growing community of fellow HeatMapsters on the HeatMap Insider Forum.

Once you select the style you are wanting to you can change it in numerous ways to suit whatever you may wish. One of the best features that I like to most is the fact that you can make your page as wide as you want and it will automatically shrink to fit your users screen res. I made mine 1024 and it fits all size displays…

To display my site logo I did not use the header I used a area just below the header in the Info Bar section of the settings page and was able to place the logo there plus and ad sense ad

There are so many different way you can make it yours, they are too numerous to mention, go and download Weaver II and see for yourself how the developers have made it easy for you to make your site the way you want it to be.

Here are ar few ofthe Setting area:

1) Weaver II Themes This is where you chose the style you want for your site.

2) Main Options are settings for the following parts of your site: General Appearance Layout Fonts Widget Areas Header Menus Links Content Areas Post Specifics Footer

3) Advanced OptionsSection HTML Insertion Page Templates Archive-type Pages Background Images Mobile SEO Site Options

4) Admin Options These options control some administrative options and appearance features.

5) Weaver II Pro Weaver II Pro Features – If you are using Weaver II Pro. Thank you.

6) Short codes Settings and information about Weaver II and Weaver II Pro Short codes are found on the Appearance→Shortcodes + Pro menu found at the left.

7) Save/Restore This option allows you to save and restore all current theme settings using your host’s Word Press database. Your options will be preserved across Weaver II theme upgrades, as well when you change to different themes. There is only one saved backup available. Weaver II Pro allows multiple saves using files.
Help You will notice next to many options and option sections on the Weaver Admin tabs. Clicking the ? will open the Weaver Help file to the appropriate place.

More help is available at the Weaver Theme web site, which includes a support forum.

Here’s a list of the additional features you’ll get when you purchase a Weaver II Pro membership:
•Over a dozen new major features – Includes Header Gadgets, Link Buttons, Social Buttons, Slider Menu, Extra Menus, RSS feed, and more.
•Complete Font Control – Specify fonts for specific elements. Easy access to all the free Google Fonts.
•Additional customization of Menu Bars
•Complete control of Sidebar Widths – allows different widths for different layouts
•Advanced options for Mobile View – Includes ability to create a completely different custom Mobile theme.
•Advanced Header and Footer

You can now use the new support system by Clicking here to get help with your installion of the above programs and Pluggins

Looking Forward to being able to help you..

Have you been looking for a Forum Plugin for WordPress that just works? Then look no further! Mingle Forum has been modified to be lightweight, solid, secure, quick to setup, easy to use, and best of all it now integrates seamlessly with or without the Mingle social networking plugin (by Blair Williams). The mission of Mingle Forum is, to “KEEP IT SIMPLE” There are a handful of Forum Plugins for WordPress available but they’re either super buggy, difficult to install, or so bloated with features and settings that it’s a nightmare setting them up. Don’t do that to yourself!!! You can be up and running with Mingle Forum fully installed and configured in as little as 5 minutes…pretty cool eh?

Need support? Navigate your way to the support forum and we’ll get with you as soon as possible. We believe a plugin is most successful when the support is successful.

NOTE: If you don’t use the mingle plugin…that’s ok! Mingle Forum has been intelli-programmed to detect if Mingle is installed and functions properly with/without it requiring no extra effort on your part.

FEATURES: (Big thanks to Eric Hamby for his past contributions to this plugin)

• NEW! SEO Friendly URLs
• NEW! Forum sitemap (../wp-content/plugins/mingle-forum/sitemap.php)
• NEW! Adsense areas
• Media embedding into forum posts (like Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket…)
• WordPress 3.0 ready!
• Categories with sub-forums
• User Groups
• User Levels (EX: Newbie, Beginner, Pro…)
• Private Messages – Forum integrates seamlessly with my Cartpauj PM Plugin (Requires Cartpauj PM vs. 1.0.09 or greater)
• Moderators
• Skins
• Captcha
• BB Code
• Smilies
• Custom Forum Search
• Guest posts (See Mingle Forum Guest Info add-on by wpweaver)
• Hot/Very Hot topics
• Sticky (Pinned) Topics
• Move, Edit, Remove and Close topics
• Forum RSS Feeds
• Email notifications on replies to topics
• Recent posts widget (or PHP shortcode for your theme)
• Integrates nicely with most themes (It’s tough to make it work for all themes so some skin modifications may be required for your site)
• Allow/Dis-allow other users to view your profile from the Forum
• Supports different languages
• Integrates with the Mingle Plugin (by Blair Williams) NOTE: The “Mingle” plugin is NOT required for forum to work
  • Avatars
  • Profile’s (Works with/without Pretty Profile URLs enabled in Mingle settings)
  • Activity in the forum shows up as activity in mingle (Helps increase discussion in both your forums and your SN)
  • Deleted forum topics will also delete the corresponding Mingle board post

TUTORIALS:
* Mingle Forum Video Tutorials by Cartpauj.com (I highly recommend starting with the videos)
* Setup Guide (Thanks to Robert D for throwing this together)
* If you need to show latest forums posts and don’t want to use the widget you can use <?php latest_activity(5, true); ?> — 5 = Number of posts to show, true = add ul tags before and after the li tags. Have you been looking for a Forum Plugin for WordPress that just works? Then look no further! Mingle Forum has been modified to be lightweight, solid, secure, quick to setup, easy to use, and best of all it now integrates seamlessly with or without the Mingle social networking plugin (by Blair Williams). The mission of Mingle Forum is, to “KEEP IT SIMPLE” There are a handful of Forum Plugins for WordPress available but they’re either super buggy, difficult to install, or so bloated with features and settings that it’s a nightmaresetting them up. Don’t do that to yourself!!! You can be up and running with Mingle Forum fully installed and configured in as little as 5 minutes…pretty cool eh?

Need support? Navigate your way to the support forum and we’ll get with you as soon as possible. We believe a plugin is most successful when the support is successful.

NOTE: If you don’t use the mingle plugin…that’s ok! Mingle Forum has been intelli-programmed to detect if Mingle is installed and functions properly with/without it requiring no extra effort on your part.

FEATURES: (Big thanks to Eric Hamby for his past contributions to this plugin)

• NEW! SEO Friendly URLs
• NEW! Forum sitemap (../wp-content/plugins/mingle-forum/sitemap.php)
• NEW! Adsense areas
• Media embedding into forum posts (like Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket…)
• WordPress 3.0 ready!
• Categories with sub-forums
• User Groups
• User Levels (EX: Newbie, Beginner, Pro…)
• Private Messages – Forum integrates seamlessly with my Cartpauj PM Plugin (Requires Cartpauj PM vs. 1.0.09 or greater)
• Moderators
• Skins
• Captcha
• BB Code
• Smilies
• Custom Forum Search
• Guest posts (See Mingle Forum Guest Info add-on by wpweaver)
• Hot/Very Hot topics
• Sticky (Pinned) Topics
• Move, Edit, Remove and Close topics
• Forum RSS Feeds
• Email notifications on replies to topics
• Recent posts widget (or PHP shortcode for your theme)
• Integrates nicely with most themes (It’s tough to make it work for all themes so some skin modifications may be required for your site)
• Allow/Dis-allow other users to view your profile from the Forum
• Supports different languages
• Integrates with the Mingle Plugin (by Blair Williams) NOTE: The “Mingle” plugin is NOT required for forum to work
  • Avatars
  • Profile’s (Works with/without Pretty Profile URLs enabled in Mingle settings)
  • Activity in the forum shows up as activity in mingle (Helps increase discussion in both your forums and your SN)
  • Deleted forum topics will also delete the corresponding Mingle board post

5 MINUTES (or less) INSTALL:

• Download Mingle Forum
• Create a new page for your forum to display on
• Head to Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New -> Upload
• Browse to the .zip file you downloaded and click open
• Click Install
• Click Activate
• You’ll now see a new admin menu called Mingle Forum
• Configure your Mingle Forum options, Set a Skin, create your Categories and Forums
• DONE! It’s that easy
• NOTE: If upgrading from the old WP Forum or WP Forum Server Plugins you will need to re-set all settings and your skin. Don’t worry, I left most of the DB structure in place so you will NOT lose your threads or posts by upgrading to Mingle Forum.

TUTORIALS:
* Mingle Forum Video Tutorials by Cartpauj.com (I highly recommend starting with the videos)
* Setup Guide (Thanks to Robert D for throwing this together)
* If you need to show latest forums posts and don’t want to use the widget you can use <?php latest_activity(5, true); ?> — 5 = Number of posts to show, true = add ul tags before and after the li tags.

Features:

• User Profile Pages
• User Friending
• User Profile Posting (for friends)
• User Profile Post Commenting (for friends)
• Friend Activity Pages
• Full Member Directory
• Login & Navigation Widget
• Random or Recent Users Widget
• Email Notifications
• User Email Notification Opt-Outs

Check it Out!

You can now try Mingle out by joining the Mingle Community! Come be my friend at:

Mingle WordPress Community

I guess calling this plugin a simple “form builder” is a bit of an understatement — people with no knowledge of HTML, CSS or programming can create extremely complex forms with ease. In fact, you can script and build all kinds of user interactions on your site with Formidable Pro. Check out some of these features:

• Fully AJAXified Form Builder – This makes it dead simple to build any kind of form you want within seconds. With pure, drag & drop controls and in-place editing you don’t need to know the first thing about HTML or CSS to be extremely effective immediately.
• A Huge Array of Field Types – Build your form from these field types (with pre-defined input styles and validation): Text Input, Paragraph Input, Multiple Selection (check boxes), Select One (radio buttons), Drop Downs,Section Dividers, Phone, Email, Date (with a Javascript date selector), Hidden Field, Hidden User ID, Website/URL, Image URL, Scale (1 to 10 input), Dynamic Fields (dependent on other data in the field) and even File Uploads!
• Fully AJAXified Form Styler — You *have* to see this one to believe it — I’m not kidding, you have 100% control over what your forms look like. Not only can they be easily embedded in your site but you can use this graphical form styler to add whatever polish you want.
• Ability to Embed or Link Directly to Forms – Quickly send out a survey to your email list or post a poll on your website, no matter how you want to deliver it, again, Formidable makes it easy.
• Form Templates — These are pre-configured forms that you can choose from. Formidable Pro ships with 4 preset form types — a contact, real estate listing, bug/defect report and an address collection form — all of which are common types of forms. But you can create your own templates and use them to create forms instantly. Steph has plans to continue adding preset template types as updates come out.
• Statistical Reports – Once you’ve sent your forms out to your audience you can see exactly how many responded and the breakdowns for each of the fields in your form. This feature is especially effective when surveying your audience.
• Data Analysis and Export — You can view all the entries from your form and export them to csv.
• Setup Custom Displays to Showcase your Data Externally — Do you want to show the results of a survey or a poll? Quickly setup a custom display and you can show the results of your survey or form on your external website.

I just can’t wait to start sending out surveys now that I’m in possession of this killer plugin!

Really, the only downside I can see to this plugin is that it’s brand new — so I suppose there could be problems with it here and there (all though in my usage of it this week, I’ve seen no signs of any instability — it feels exceptionally solid).

The other thing that’s really impressive about this plugin is that it is so inexpensive. The single website version is only $35 and for that amount you still get lifetime support and updates.  And in addition to this, she’s got a 30 day money back guarantee.

Overall, this plugin is well thought out, feels extremely solid and is impressively powerful. I’m a Formidable Pro affiliate, but even if I weren’t, I’d still highly recommend it — I’m switching all of my surveys over to it as we speak. I’ll try to keep everyone here informed about updates to it and how it’s working for me ..