Besting Adwords

Google Referrals Sucks

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 18:31:24 GMT

I'm really struggling with Google Referrals, the CPA (cost per action) equivalent of Google AdSense. Today, I got a second referral on the same ad and the amount paid for $5+, which is pretty good. So, I was thinking that I should run that ad exclusively on the website that is generating the conversions. I can't figure out how. I used the search to find the ad, but I simply couldn't find it, yet it continues to run on my website. Anybody have any ideas? Currently, I have the same CPA unit running a category of ads, which this ad belongs to. Scanning the category does reveal the ad either.

BuildWith.com

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:12:22 GMT

BuildWith.com is a great tool for figuring out what a website was built with. Does the site use Analytics, AdSense, which web server, which web framework, etc.

http://builtwith.com/default.aspx?http://kbcafe.com/

NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:26:44 GMT

This last weekend, I had major outages on some of my sites because Google was indexing the hell out of them. Google's indexer has no fear. If it can denial of service a website, then it will by sending boundless amounts of requests. I noticed today in the logs that Google was indexing some really low value pages and their were millions of them. The solution was simple, I added the noindex <meta> tag to these pages.

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html

Unfortunately, Google will continue to index these pages at least one more time each before it gets the points.

Lesson: Be careful what you let Google index.

Follow up: I looked at Google's webmasters site for a possible better solution. At this point, Google doesn't provide a mechanism for slowing the indexing of sites. Even the sitemap protocol does not provide a mechanism for specifying how to index millions of pages without actually listing the millions of pages in a sitemap. Google's suggested solution doesn't really address the problem.