All About Content

According to AuctionBytes (an online publication for online merchants): As of June 1st, eBay will no longer compensate affiliates for “paid search traffic purchased from Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, nor from any of their content networks, such as Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN ContentAds, if it is linked directly to the eBay.com, eBay Express, or eBay Store domains.”

As strange as it might seem for someone who spends as much time on the Web as I do, I’ve never purchased anything off eBay, much less set up an eBay affiliate account, so I can’t speak from personal experience the way I do some of the other affiliate programs; however, this move could have a big impact.

Based on discussions I’ve had with folks who run the corporate LinkShare Referral Program for a certain large electronics retailer, nearly all of the company’s active LinkShare affiliates send traffic via PPC ads, not from the links that are provided for inclusion on web sites.

Furthermore, I just learned that Google is starting to bar affiliates from bidding on PPC ads also — this isn’t restricted to just eBay affiliates. I can only assume that they mean affiliates are not allowed to bid on keywords for which the parent company is also bidding. Surely they’d be allowed to pick up non-competitive phrases. Otherwise that would be even more ridiculous “punishment” for affiliate marketers who ought to have every right to advertise.

Ironically, while cutting affiliates out of the PPC game might somehow arguably improve the paid results (even though affiliates often have distinctive pricing from the parent, so I don’t buy that argument!), this move might actually lower the cost of keywords for those players who get to remain in the game — it’s economics: less competition equals lower prices. That and seeing as a lot of business comes from affiliates and resellers, it seems Google may be cutting off a finger of the hand that feeds its money-making AdWords machine.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo told Search Engine Land to “expect minor changes” in Yahoo’s organic listings over the next few days. Things should settle into place by Friday, according to Mayer.

Domain squatting is becoming more sophisticated. Companies like Sendori are going beyond parking AdSense ads on good web real estate, instead opting to lease their in-demand domains to the highest bidder. The winner of a Sendori auction gets the domain to redirect to his own site.

It’s a service big brands will want to take advantage of (this being the next best thing to actually being able to buy the domain from the squatter) but I have a real problem with it.

The domain owner is basically just a parasite. They add nothing of value. Sendori has no interest in selling the domain, because they get to hold on to all the control. It’s not like the other company will want to build links or brand recognition for that URL since it doesn’t own it and that would be doing the equivalent of major remodeling on a rental unit — not a good investment.

Companies like Sendori are basically just holding those good domains hostage. Well… on the bright side, at least if they are redirecting to other sites those URLs won’t just be ugly, AdSense-stuffed (and often misleading) landing pages.

More from TechCrunch.

A while back I had a couple of thoughts about various paid blogging services, including SponsoredReviews.com. From the advertiser’s perspective, I didn’t think SponsoredReviews.com offered anything better than its better-known competitors.

I’d been wanting to try going through the process of writing a paid review for the service to see what kind of experience it provided to the bloggers. I had a choice of either waiting for someone to approach me directly (a la ReviewMe) or bidding on an open project. However, none of my bids were being accepted at what I considered to be a reasonable fee.

Finally, this week a company called My Content Website accepted my bid of $5.00, 35% of which goes directly to SponsoredReviews.com. That’s the lowest net payout possible of any of the services available for this method of monetizing one’s blog.

Plus, because the blogger has only 5 days to finish a review after the bid is accepted, but at the same time doesn’t have any idea when an advertiser will accept the bid, the odds are pretty good that you’ll miss that opportunity (and once you’ve missed the opportunity, you can’t rebid).

If you’re looking to monetize your blog via paid blog posts, I wouldn’t recommend SponsoredReviews.com.

This has been a sponsored post (which is to pay about enough to buy a decent cup of coffee).

Update:
By the way, if SponsoredReview.com doesn’t accept your post, check that the URLs and anchor text match the request exactly — the automated system that checks the links is case sensitive!

Recently, a Google search results page presented a notice at the bottom that I’ve never seen before:

Clicking on the “read the DMCS complaint” link takes you to a copy of the complaint on ChillingEffects.org — a project co-managed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the law clinics of Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law — which publishes these cease and desist letters to copyright infringers.

At first it appears these letters are published as a way to shame the copyright infringer, but if you take a closer look at the site it becomes clear that ChillingEffects.org seeks to prevent abuse of the DMCA by companies or individuals trying to squelch free speech.

From the site’s homepage:

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to “chill” legitimate activity.

Recipients of cease and desist (C&D) letters are encouraged to contribute them to the Chilling Effects database. Some letters are published and subjected to legal scrutiny and/or explanations of actions/recourse the recipient can take.

Google has info on how to file a copyright infringement complaint regarding infringing material that can be found through Google Search. Any C&D letter you send to Google may be forwarded to ChillingEffects.org.

I was just taking another tour of the Blogsvertise FAQs and came across this little tidbit:

“We are no longer approving Wordpress blogs [for inclusion in the Blogsvertise program] because Wordpress has made the decision to delete blogs with paid content on them. Sorry, please consider submitting another blog for consideration.”

It struck me as way over the top that WordPress would just start deleting accounts because it contained paid links and I was surprised I hadn’t picked up any stories about this before, given that I follow the industry very carefully. I did some digging around and found this item from November.

The WordPress terms of service include several restrictions on what can be posted, including: “the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites.”

After another read-through I determined that you’re not allowed to use their hosting and domain if you’re going to use your blog for commercial purposes; but that it’s fine to use the WordPress publishing platform to post paid content, affiliate links and that type of stuff to a blog that’s on your own domain and host.

This actually seems quite fair to me. If you’re going to be using up their bandwidth, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to ask that you not profit off a service they provide to you for free.

Whether you’re intent on monetizing your blog, or you just want to be seen as credible, you absolutely need to get your site onto its own domain. If you’re successful — apparently you can earn up to $10,000 in a month with PayPerPost — the domain registration and hosting fees will absolutely pay for themselves.

Click here for more info about Domain Name Registration.

A study released last month determined that only 30% of Internet users access the mobile Internet on their devices. The study is based on a series of focus groups and a survey of 1,001 mobile users. Of those who do surf the mobile Web, a whopping 75% use mobile search. No stats on how many people actually do any shopping from their cell phone. My guess is close to zero. (Surfing an e-commerce site and entering your credit card info on a PDA would be the suck.)

Filed under: whines and rants

So my broadband connection has been down for quite a while now. (I hadn’t noticed because my computer automatically connected me to a close-by wifi signal; it only became obvious to me that my own Internet connection was down when my TiVo let me know it had stopped updating its TV programming info.)

So I’ve had to call Comcast to fix the issue (it was definitely an issue with the cable box or downstream of the cable modem, not my ‘puter). The experience has led me to a discovery that could be a business opportunity for someone — Comcast is apparently in need of better service scheduling/tracking software.

Comcast technician #1 arrives Saturday (an hour ahead of my scheduled window, but that was cool with me), fiddles around with everything and determines it has something to do with something between my unit (the dwelling, not the cable box) and the amplifier on the roof. She gets on the phone with dispatch and tells me the earliest anyone can come out to look at the line is Monday. We decide to schedule something for the following Saturday since I didn’t want to take time off work.

On Sunday afternoon, I’m enjoying a nice iced mocha from Dean and Deluca, and I get a call from Comcast: was I not aware I had an appointment for someone to come over today? Uh? No, I wasn’t aware that a Sunday appointment was even an option, but sure I’ll run home real quick to let the second cable person in.

I explain the situation to Comcast technician #2, who had been told absolutely nothing about the previous service call and therefore needs to repeat the entire troubleshooting procedure. He determines first cable person was wrong and it really was just the box. Cable person #2 doesn’t have a replacement box (something cable person #1 would have left for me had she properly diagnosed the issue). Cable person #2 sets me up with an appointment Friday afternoon (sometime between 1 and 5) to have someone drop off a new box. Don’t see why this would require an appointment, but am told I’d have to be home.

Get a call this morning (Monday) confirming my appointment with Comcast today. Huh? Woman on the phone doesn’t know what the service call is supposed to be about but promises to make a note in the system advising the technician just to drop the hardware off at the front desk. Since they want the old modem back, I rescheduled the drop-off for tomorrow so I can bring it to the front desk tonight.

So we’ll see what happens. Hopefully tomorrow will be the last day they’ll need to remind me about the daily appointments I seem to have set up with them. (But more important: I’m cautiously hopeful that my Internet connection will be back up.)

Little story from a week and a half ago: On Friday we launched a new flow for one of our subcatalogs; the first time an entire section of the e-commerce flow was designed with SEO specifically in mind. (This included things such as page titles, breadcrumb structure, markup, etc.)

On Monday I’m asked what we did wrong that prevented us from being on the first page for searches on those product names.

Good Gawd! Those hundreds of new pages got indexed over the weekend. In many cases we’re even ranked in the top 100 results for searches on those products. That’s all you should be hoping for at this point.

We even found one example (of a four-word term) where we ranked on the first page for the name of a product.

And I’m asked what we did wrong?!

Apparently “expectation management” is what I’m doing wrong.

Very disturbing article in the Washington Post yesterday. According to Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers, “women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms — a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere.”

The author of the wonderful blog Creating Passionate Users is facing death threats. She’s just one of innumerable numbers of women who have stopped blogging or participating in online communities because of intimidation and sexual threats. The moral dilemma for me is that she says the more attention she’s getting, the worse it gets. I’m struggling over whether we other bloggers should drop the subject entirely and get her name out of the spotlight. But this is an important issue to me and I think it needs to be discussed — and nothing I say or don’t say will change this situation. What makes some people so vile? And what is it about the anonymity of the Web that turns already-vile people into full-blown sociopaths? And, specifically, whence this hostility toward women? And why?!

Some people critize female bloggers who decide to exit the space after being threatened and harassed as being thin-skinned; they say it’s “just talk”. I think those people probably have pretty poor instincts.

It reminds me of an interesting aphorims I read once: In The Gift of Fear (a book I haven’t read but have seen referenced many times), Gavin De Becker says that at core, men are afraid that women will laugh at them; and at core, women are afraid men will kill them.

I don’t know anyone who’s laughing.

Updated May 7, 2007:
Slate has an article that mirrors some of my thoughts on the issue (i.e., why “just ignore it” isn’t an actual solution to the problem).