I use AdSense on 1 of my websites and a while back I discovered some things about this service from Google.

One thing that I think is awful and shows how big corporates ONLY care about money was that I knew a website that was banned (black listed) by Google because they were “violating Google’s terms of services” by helping people buy and sell text link ads and now when I search for the name of the site, it doesn’t show up in normal search results. The messed up part is that this particular website bought AdWords ads and their name shows up in sponsored links section right on the top of the search results.

This means 2 things: 1 - Google doesn’t care much about what you do when you pay, 2 - You can BUY the first spot on Google SERPs!!!

What they could do is to check the URLs against their banned list but…

The other thing about AdSense is this: Have you ever clicked on an AdSense link with confidence? have you ever seen anything valuable in those links?
Many of them are links that take you to irrelevant pages and many of the people who buy these keywords have so much money that they want the traffic in anyway they can, by bidding on keywords that have nothing to do with their pages.

This could be very bad, you are sending your visitors away with AdSense in the first place, but sadly you are sending them to pages that are not good.

It’s unfortunate but it’s what it is for now.

You may have noticed that in search result pages (SERPs) of Google, there is a two line description:

Google uses (most of the time) your meta description (if it thinks it’s more relevant) and if your description is too long, it will cut it and show 3 dots at the end:

If you don’t want this ti happen, write a good description that is only 155 characters long, for example, in this case the description fits perfectly:

So when writing a meta description remember: (in no particular order)

1 - Write a meta description that is 155 characters long. (or less, obviously)
2 - Write a meta description that is descriptive.
3 - Write a meta description that is provocative.
4 - Use your primary keyword(s) in it, don’t write a stream of keywords, write something meaningful.

Those of you who know me know that one of the client projects I’m working on for many years is Bloggapedia.

It started as a categorized collection of blogs and then became a blogging community.

From the very beginning, I always bugged everyone involved to let me make a search engine out of it and a few months back they finally agreed and told me to go for it. So it took me a while to develop the search part and the blogs are manually approved so there is really no junk.

Right now Bloggapedia is a full text search engine (and it doesn’t use MySQL’s fulltext search either, it was too slow ) and it searches all the blogs in the database at the speed of light and the quality of the result is great!

Now, there is another famous blog search engine called Icerocket. Icerocket has so much reputation and it’s name is everywhere BUT I don’t understand why?

For example take a look at the search result for the term “Sushi” on Icerocket:

http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=blog&fr=h&q=sushi

Now, compare this with Bloggapedia:

http://www.bloggapedia.com/blog_search.php?q=Sushi&=posts

Do you see the difference?

And hey if you are from Icerocket, I can fix this for you

One of my clients was buying Stumble traffic and as soon as he stopped doing it, Alexa rank for his site dropped by 1000s.
We think this is because users with Stumble toolbar tend to have Alexa toolbar too. (and probably other toolbars)