Adsense Competitive Ad Filter

Let’s see what they actually are and how are they helping publishers like us.

Faster Filter List Processing:
Earlier, the Competitve Ad Filter was taking about 24 to 48 hours to process URLs in your filter list after you add them. Now, after the update, its likely to take at most 30 minutes to activate. Which means, you can now research with the list faster. You find a MFA or LCPC advertiser, you put the URL in the filter list and after 30 minutes, it’s gone. Its allowing publishers to make quick changes to their list and to keep the sites clean from SPAM ads.

Incleased Filter List with 500 URLs:
You can now add up to 500 URLs in your list. Means, more space for genuine advertisers. Many of us was really running out of limit for filtering sites and this will let us to go for it. Remember, filtering out advertisers may also impact your potential ernings negatively. You must be confident when you put a URL on the list.

The post above gives you a general idea of what you can do with the new features. Its highly recommended that you understand the risk of loosing revenue if handled improperly.

What does Google think about paid links?
Google is very clear about paid links. They don’t like them. Google even has an official form that enables webmasters to report paid links to Google:

“Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.“

No Paid Links

“Today I found that my entire site has dropped out of site in search results. I have a site that received over 2,000 search visits per day and today that has stopped.”

It turned out that the website has many affiliate links and other links to advertisers that looked like paid links to Google. Unfortunately, these links were not marked as paid links and Google penalized the website for having the paid links.

What does this mean for your website?
You should avoid paid links if you don’t want to get in trouble with Google. If you do buy or sell links, make sure that the links contain the rel=”nofollow” attribute. By using that attribute, you show that the paid link is for advertising purposes only and that you don’t want to manipulate your website rankings with the link.

While Google doesn’t like paid links at all, they also make clear that links are very important:

“Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.”

For that reason, you should try to get as many good links to your website as possible. The quality is more important than the quantity.

Links that point to your website are a very important factor that influences the position of your website in Google’s search results. The links that point to your website should be from related websites and they should contain the keywords for which you want to get high rankings.

Do not manipulate the links to your website by buying links and do not join automated link systems to increase the number of links to your website. There are many ways to get good links (related websites, blogs, social bookmark sites, directories, etc.).

Here is a video from Matt Cutts letting us know why they have devalued it. This is a must watch video if you wanna optimize your pages for Google.

The video is about 1:57 minutes long and 7.35 MB in size

The problem with links from spammy websites is that it is very difficult to do something against them. For example, a competitor could add your website to a link farm network or the competitor could spam with your URL.

Google

Google has released an official statement about spammy links
This month, Google published an official statement about low quality links in their webmaster blog. Here are the main statements:

1. Linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithm but it is just one of many factors. Other factors are the content of your web pages, the site structure and the appearance of a keyword in the different web page elements.
2. If you have a high quality website and get links from spammy websites, try to contact the website owners and ask them to remove their links. Google will not help you with that.
3. Google recommends to optimize the many factors than influence indexing and ranking.
4. Google says that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time and that they may not be considered by Google’s ranking algorithm.
5. If you want to make sure Google knows about the spammy links and is valuing them appropriately, you can report them to Google with their spam report or paid links report forms.

What does this mean for the rankings of your website?
Low quality links are usually links from low quality websites. These website usually have low Google rankings and they cannot pass much ranking power to other websites. For that reason, you shouldn’t worry too much about links to your website that you cannot control. Better focus on the following:

• Create high quality web pages with a good website navigation and optimized web page content. Make sure that all web page elements contain the right information so that Google will list your website for the right keywords.
• Try to get high quality links to your website. The more high quality links your website has, the less impact have links from spammy websites.

vBulletin Logo

To be honest, I must tell you before I proceed that I already upgraded my license and the post below tells why you should upgrade now to use all the opportunities.

vBulletin version 3 was first introduced in March, 2004 and sevaral upgrade was released since then, but, no mejor version was released. The price for new license and renewal price fluctuated a bit, but those are not worth to mention. Now, please let me tell you why you should make use of the pre-sale window being offered by Jelsoft.

For those, who have a active leased license:

• If you intend to keep the software in your server, you must renew the license sooner or later, right? If you don’t act now, you have to pay $175 when you renew the license. But, you are getting it for $130 for now.
• Say, you renewed your license just before the pre-sale window was announced and you have a whole year of validity period. After one year, you have to renew it and your lease licensed will be converted to a owned license. You are saving $45 here and a whole year of owned license. Good.

For those, who have a Owned License:

• You’ll get the Version 4.0 for free until the Version 5.0 comes out, but you have to keep paying $40 per year yo get access to vbulletin.org and support. If we calculate the proportional rate, the release of vB 5.0 shouldn’t come before 4 or 5 years. Therefor, you have to pay $200 ($40×5) to updates and support. Here you are saving about $70 plus getting the license for the Blog and CMS.

For those, who have a Expired/Inactive License:

• Sorry, but there are some little discount for you. The discounts are available only if you upgrade your renewal for Publishing Suite. For licenses that expired in last 12 months are getting the publishing suite in $190 ($95 off) and for licenses that expired in more than 12 months ago getting the publishing suite in $210 ($75 off). So, if you just want to upgrade to the Forum, I’d suggest you to wait till the v4.0 releases and renew the licenses in $175. But, if you want the whole suite instead, go for it now.

To let you remember it, the Pre-Sale Window is closing on 30th October, 2009 and the prices will be $285 and $175 respectively for the Suite and Forum.