Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

Yahoo! has launched its new tool named Site Explorer. Here’s what Yahoo itself says about it:

What is Yahoo! Site Explorer?
The Yahoo! search database contains detailed information about the structure of the web. In addition to the web pages themselves, the database stores information about links among pages, and uses that information (as well as additional algorithms) to gauge the popularity of a given page.

Site Explorer gives you access to this information so you can learn about a site. To explore a site, you submit a URL using a search box, just as you would for a normal web search. You can then click links on the results page to see detailed information.

Basically, you get to see the site pages indexed by Yahoo and the site’s inbound links. The results can also be exported into a tab-delimited file.

Yahoo also provides APIs for this new feature, which makes it more useful for applications designed for retrieving site-specific data from Yahoo. Otherwise, I haven’t seen anything really astonishing that couldn’t be achieved previously with site: and link: searches, though there have been reports that the inbound links displayed by Site Explorer are more accurate.

It is now possible to receive AdSense payments directly instead of checks. Quoting AdSense support:

What’s New - September 2005
Electronic Funds Transfer is out of beta

Electronic Funds Transfer is ready for the big-time! We’ve been working hard on our payment system, and with our thanks to the thousands of AdSense publishers who took part in our beta test, we’re now ready to bring EFT out of beta.

Publishers who have already received payments through EFT don’t need to do anything – they can continue to have their payments conveniently deposited directly into their bank accounts.

If you would like to sign up for the first time, you’ll need to enter your bank account information through your AdSense account. We’ll then make a small test deposit into that bank account – once you’ve verified the amount of this test deposit, you’ll be all set up for direct deposit. Please note that, if you signed up during the beta period but didn’t receive a payment, you’ll need to register your bank account again now and complete the verification process.

Remember, there’s no charge to receive your payments through EFT, and your AdSense payments are converted into your local currency before being deposited directly into your bank account. EFT is available to publishers with payment addresses in 16 different countries.

I have seen it some time ago but thought I’d mention it here now - it is a blog fully dedicated to this topic. The owner explores the isues of Blogger censorship in-depth and tries to collect all facts available as well as the opinions of both sides. Here it is: Censorship by Blogger.

everybody has to either do them, or become their victim, or run into sites doing them. Yahoo is the most recent suspect, as reported in the SearchEngineWatch blog:

Paid Inclusion Making Yahoo Results Seem Hijacked? looks at the confusing situation one of our forum moderators Jeff Martin found when looking at some listings in Yahoo. They redirected through Business.com until winding up at sites that had nothing to do with that B2B search engine. Jeff also describes more here. What’s up? I posted my thoughts in the forum thread. To me, it looks like Yahoo is taking a paid inclusion feed from Business.com — hence why the click redirects through Business.com before hitting the destination sites. In other words, buy some listings in Business.com, and those are distributed also through Yahoo. That’s a long-time tactic. LookSmart long did the same.

Of course there is a thread about it on Threadwatch.org as well.

Just seen this article quoting the recent news of Google planning on starting its own ISP service for free. In the light of the recent news about Google, i wonder if people will be required to use their Google account in order to be able to use this WiFi, and will the Internet accessed through this ISP be Google-filtered?

A while ago I posted here about my plans to write a blog&ping article. I know it took me enormously, indecently long to actually get to doing it but here we go - “Blog and Ping Techniques ( Splogs )”, as Earl tagged it, can now be read on syndk8.

One little disclaimer: I know very well splogs are now a buzzword and should be used in order to attract people’s attention - it’s almost a new SEO technique of a sort - but I am not really too fond of this word. “Blogs” are artificial enough to make them even more artificially sounding…

This Threadwatch.org post reports of Google’s new whim - it is now forcing AdWords users to use a Google account, like the one they’d have to have to use Gmail, Google alerts or Google Personalized search. A Quote form Google’s AdWords FAQ:

Why is Google asking me to update my AdWords login?

Soon, we’ll be changing our AdWords login system to Google Accounts. We’re doing this to help increase your security and make your life simpler with one email and password. A Google Account lets you access multiple Google services (such as AdWords, Froogle, Google Groups, and more) with a single email and password.

You’ll soon be able to update your login any time before Jan. 15, 2006, through your account. Here are some things to consider when updating your login:
< ...>
# If you already have a Google Account, you can use it as your new AdWords login. You might already have a Google Account if you use Gmail, Google Groups, Google Alerts, Froogle Shopping List, Personalized Search, Personalized Homepage, and Google Answers.
…

What an interesting move, indeed. This is enough to make half the users paranoid. Google must have some sort of a monster plan to collect all this enormous amount of - at the first glance - unrelated data under the same umbrella. Will they now charge AdWords users based on the number of Gmail emails they get every day? Will the frequency of their ads display depend on how much they use Google personalized search? If I were in their shoes, I’d probably create a separate account for AdWords, just in case…

This has me wondering now: what will be Google’s next move - switch AdSense accounts to the Unified Google Account? Burn everybody’s Google account on their forehead?

Has everybody seen it yet on their home page?

Google has introduced a new feature, for now as an experiment only. It lets the users shape the SERPs to their liking by removing unwanted results reporting them as spam. OK, this will only remove the sites in question from a user’s personal searches, not from Google’s SERPs shown to everybody else. This is only available to users with Google accounts - and as we mentioned earlier, anybody can get a Google account now with any email address they’d like to provide. All you need to do to report a spammy site is go to the form and fill out all the details. It’s still not known how this will influence the general SERPs in the long run. Matt Cutts says on his blog:

Q: Are you going to use this data to improve general search?
A: It’s too early to say. It’s still an experiment that may not even launch; it depends on how people like it. The form or format could also change as well.

Well, seems like Google is sort of repeating itself. Maybe not itself directly but doesn’t it remind you of Blogger’s infamous Flag button? Moreover, Google is repeating Yahoo again. People have already noted this feature’s resemblance to Yahoo’s option for blocking unwanted results from personalized search. Anyway, the field for manipulating it is really huge….

Just read on Threadwatch about Google’s innovation on Blogger: they now let you add your AdSense code and even register for a new AdSense account right from your Blogger account. I got curious and went to check for myself and this is what I found.

They added a tab for AdSense in the Template section. When you switch to it you have an option to either register a new Adsense account (I wonder if then you get approved for it automatically?) or log into an existing account. Unfortunately, I was not able to verify what happens next as as soon as I clicked on the “Sign In” button I was redirected to a page saying:

Error
We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.

Looks like either Google was a bit too early to announce the new feature or everyone was so eager to test it out right away that it crashed… Very sad….

If Blogger wasn’t owned by Google who already knows all the logins and passwords for Adsense I’d say it could be a phishing page for retrieving people’s Adsense login information.

One more important side note: the TOS has been changed again, and one thing I noticed there that drew my attention was this:

In addition, Google reserves the right to terminate without notice any account that has not generated a sufficient number of valid clicks on or valid impressions of Ads (as measured by Google) for a period of two (2) months or more.

Makes one wonder - what would that “sufficient number of clicks” be? $100 worth? more? less?