Podcast for January 08, 2007 (about 22 mins / 22mb’s)

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Show Notes

- Recession Already Here?: BBC News
- New Mac Pro’s: Gizmodo
- Google TV: Search Engine Land
- Smartest Guys on the Web Ignorant of Affiliate Marketing: ReveNews
- Omission of Affiliate Marketing in Marketing List: 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Blogs
- Good conference tips: Valleywag

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January 4, 2008 podcast (about 22 mins / 10mb’s)

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Shownotes

-Obama’s Iowa Victory Speech
-Edison Fries an Elephant 100 Years Ago Today - Wired
-Google’s OCR Patent a Game Changer?? InformationWeek and Techcrunch. More on TechMeme
-eBooks Not Worth Their Weight in Paper - Carsten Cumbrowski on ReveNews
-Don’t Spam: King Ralsky Indicted - The Register
-Great, Here Comes the Facebook Malware - Secret Crush App
-OLPC and Intel Break Up - PCWorld
-Shawn’s OLPC Post
-Asus eee
-Photos of my Asus eee

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*Image via Point Oh! (a great online marketing read, btw)*

Nifty widget to keep track of your AdSense earnings:

MacAdSense 0.5 - Widget displays AdSense earnings, click count, eCPM values and more. (Free): “

MacAdSense 0.5

MacAdSense shows your AdSense earnings, click count, eCPM values for the current month, and the extrapolated earnings for the whole month (by using a very simple rule of three method) on your Dashboard. All values are updated every 20 minutes.

More information

“

(Via MacUpdate - Mac OS X.)

With the trend of including video and images into search results spreading to all the major search engines, it’s more important than ever to optimize multimedia to assist in your search marketing results.

Search Engine Journal has a detailed post on optimizing video and images for search:

There’s more than one way to get organic search traffic. That’s the message that you should be hearing from your search engine (SEO) optimizer these days. With the advent of Universal Search, the traditional organic search result is getting pushed further and further down the page and this effect will only get more pronounced. You might also be failing to get any benefit from a whole range of highly targeted content on your site that isn’t being presented to the search engines in such a way that they can understand it and present it to searchers.

SearchEngineJournal - Niche SEO: Image & Video, Local Search & Social Media Optimization

PageRank is the all-important (or at least it was the all-important) ranking mechanism for bloggers and website owners. Having a high pagerank meant a life of relative ease and riches while having a low pagerank of 1 or 2 meant a life of shoveling coal in an unsafe mine. Or something like that.

Nevertheless, understanding pagerank has never been an easy endeavor, but this post lays out some nice fundamentals:

Put another way, the more links to a page, the more ‘votes’ it gets and the higher its PageRank. Adding more complexity to that idea, the votes are weighted by the PageRank of each linking page and tempered by the amount of links that referring page has.

As Si Fiskin expertly points out, there were some critical limitations to this early PageRank model. The final equation documented in the research paper includes adjustments to correct the limitations, as you will understand by reading this post. Let me warn you that this post gets quite mathematical. Brace yourself!

SEOmoz - Two Important Adjustments to the Early PageRank Model

This isn’t an in depth report or work of astonishing research… but it is a fun animated explanation of the Google basics…

Business Interactive Features - Diagrams - Illustrations - Portfolio.com

Site owners and merchants should be concerned when duplicate content starts to negatively affect site rankings. 

The AMWSO blog has a great post outlining the issues and possible fixes for duplicate content in the context of affiliate marketing…

Many merchants who run affiliate programs make available content for their affiliates to use on affiliate sites. A common question / concern asked of AMWSO is if this content is being distributed to all affiliates, and multiple affiliates are using the content, will this incur a search engine penalty?  It’s a question asked of us both from the merchant perspective, as they redistribute content on their own pages, and also from the affiliate perspective, since the affiliates want to use that content.

Affiliate Marketing Blog by AMWSO: Duplicate Content Search Engine Penalties and Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate Marketing Blog

Google raises the bar for access to its AdSense API.

What does this mean for other "small time" publishers (developers) on other platforms?

"Google has raised the required minimum traffic limit for publishers who wish to use its AdSense API to 100,000 page views per day. The AdSense API was introduced in March as a way for sites with user generated content to share advertising revenue with their members.

Slashdot | Google Quietly Closes AdSense API to Small Sites

Feeds and subscriber stats are now included in Google’s always handy Webmaster Tools.

Google’s Webmaster tools keeps getting better and better as more features are rolled out. Aside from the new look of the webmaster tools interface which was recently introduced, the webmaster tools now tracks subscriber statistics of every blog that users listed in their respectective accounts. The subscriber statistics tracks down all subscription made to blog feeds of enrolled sites, using the different Google services such as iGoogle, Reader and Orkut.

Google Rolls Out New Webmaster Tools Features

Google’s Adsense referral program has been hit or miss for publishers and affiliates since it’s launch.  Digital Inspiration gives a few pointers that might help you to make it a viable part of your monthly income…

Unlike the regular Adsense ads (CPC or CPM)where Google automatically picks relevant ads based on the content, Adsense Referrals (CPA) require some effort on the part of Adsense publishers because they have to manually select products from the vast Adsense inventory that is changing almost everyday. How do you find the Adsense Referral Ads that are likely to become popular among your visitors ?

Adsense Referrals - How to Pick Relevant Products That Convert at Digital Inspiration - Software Reviews, Internet and Technology Guide

If you’re a GMail fan like I am, you’ll be relieved to know that you can keep those almost full accounts up and humming with a few bucks.

I just upgraded to 250 gigs. Sweeeet.

Techmeme: Pay for More Gmail Storage (Ionut Alex Chitu/Google Operating System)

Interesting debate on a few forums dedicated to search and all things Google about the possibility of Google doing away with PageRank or at least eliminating it from the toolbar. Loren Baker has a nice post on the issue:  

There is currently a debate going on right now about Google removing the PageRank score from the Google Toolbar.

Why?

• Toolbar PageRank numbers can be 3 months out of date or more.
• Some ?PR Updates? have been buggy enough to seriously misrepresent a page?s real PR.
• Matt Cutts has blogged that PR Updates are considered pretty much a non-event around Google.
• PageRank has started a flawed econonmy of link building and trading in an effort to raise or distribute these scores.

Goodbye Google PageRank?

My favorite bookmarking site (and steady traffic source), del.icio.us has opened up it’s robot.txt file to allow in Google, Yahoo and Ask spiders. 

What does this mean for affiliates?  Could be a nice traffic source if you play smartly… 

After denying search engines from indexing the millions of bookmarks stored on its servers for so long, del.icio.us has finally lifted the entry barrier but selectively.

 According to the robots.txt of del.icio.us, only spiders from Yahoo!, Google and Ask search engines are allowed to crawl and index the content of del.icio.us - all other bots are banned including msnbot of the Microsoft Live search engine.

What does this mean for sites / URLs that are popular on del.icio.us - you could see a surge in search engine traffic but getting listed on del.icio.us won’t add any link authority or google juice since all links on delicious are marked with nofollow, very similar to Wikipedia.

del.icio.us Opens Flood Gates But Only for Google, Yahoo! & Ask.com at Digital Inspiration Technology Guide