Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

Google is promoting a new service today called the Google Web History Service. While technically this feature has been around for a long time, Google for the first time is promoting this service. You need to have a Google Account to sign in and be able to use this service.

With the Google Web History Service, you would be able to

a. View and manage your web activity. You can view and search across the full text of the pages you have visited with this service enabled including your Google web serarches, web pages, images, videos and news stories.

 b. Improve your Google Search results. Since you are letting Google profile you and your online activity, based on your incoming email, the web sites you visit most often etc, Google can provide you with a more accurate and relevant search results. At the same time, you are also letting Google serve you with better targetted ads than ever before.

c. Notice trends in your web activity. You can see interesting trends such as your most visited site or times when you are most active online etc

How to enable the Google Web History Service

1. Visit the Google History webpage. Once you sign in using your Google Account, you are asked to agree with Google Terms of Service.

2. To include the web pages you visit in your web history, you need to install the Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled. . Having PageRank enabled will send information about the pages you visit to Google and associate it with your Google Account.

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Google Adsense referral program allowed publishers and webmasters the opportunity to earn additional revenue by exposing their visitors to high quality products offered by Google. Traditionally such product referrals included Google AdSense (Ad revenue for web publishers), Google AdWords (Targeted online advertising), Google Checkout (A faster, safer way to shop online), Google Apps (Communication and collaboration tools for businesses and organizations including Gmail and more), Firefox plus Google Toolbar (Improved web browsing) and Google Pack (Collection of essential software)

Now, it seems that Google is expanding the product it is offering through its referral program. The image below is a screenshot I took this morning while looking under the Adsense Products. Note that these products do not get any CTR yet… but very interesting. Some very lucrative products that you can refer include the Microsoft XBox, shared web hosting etc…

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Google Sitemaps is an excellent tool used by a lot of webmasters out there including us at AskStudent.  As a webmaster, you would always want to exercise greater control over what is indexed by the search engines. For this purpose, most of use a robots.txt file or robots meta tag to tell the search engine spiders what we don’t want indexed. But sometimes, you like to remove content that was already indexed.

As an example, at AskStudent, couple of months ago we had .html then .php static pages serving content before we moved to WordPress to serve out content. What happened during this move was that a lot of static .html pages from AskStudent were already indexed. This resulted in errors such as the ones shown below showing up for the search engine crawlers.

So how do you remove such content that’s already been indexed? Well…. Google Sitemaps has added a brand new tool today which will allow webmasters to expedite the removal of outdated links instead of waiting for the next crawl.

In your webmaster tools account, under the Diagnostic tab, you will see a new option called URL Removals. To get started, click on the URL removals link, then New Removal Request and then choose the option that matches the type of removal you want to persue.

Individual URLs

You can choose to remove an individual URL or an image using this option. According to Google, in order for the URL to be eligible for removal, you must meet one of the following criteria.

• The URL most return a status code of either 404 or 410.
• The URL must be blocked by the site’s robots.txt file.
• The URL must be blocked by a robots meta tag.

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A lot of websites and blogs including at AskStudent, we run Google Adsense to serve targetted advertising to our visitors. However, for a site getting a lot of visitors, think about this: How many of them are potential advertisers for your site?

At AskStudent, where our primary audience is students and teenagers, there are a lot of advertisers out there trying to reach this market. Now let’s assume an advertiser comes across your site and feels it would a good site to advertise on. You don’t want to lose this advertiser, right? That’s where Onsite Advertiser Sign-up comes in: Advertisers can create site-targeted campaigns directly from your site.

Although the ‘Advertise on this site’ link will no longer appear on your ad units following last week’s ad format change, you can still display a separate Onsite Advertiser Sign-up link on your site, such as within the sidebars or footers of your pages. This method offers you more flexibility as far as the placement, the font, and the color of the link, and can help you retain interested advertisers who visit your site.

If you’d like to create such a link on your site, just follow the detailed instructions shown below and then add your link into the HTML source of your pages. If you use CSS on your site, you can create a nice rollover and make your link even more visible to potential advertisers:

Once you’ve created a separate link, don’t forget to customize your Onsite Advertiser Sign-up page. Please keep in mind that it’s currently only possible to customize one landing page per account. In other words, advertisers can target each of your sites individually, but they’ll see the same landing page when they click an ‘Advertise on this site’ link from any of your sites.

We encourage you to give this new method a try and to experiment with various placements. Having more interested advertisers bidding on your site means increased competition — which in turn translates into higher revenue potential for you.

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If you are logged in into any Google Service such as GMail or Google Notebook or Google Analytics or any other service from Google and then visit Google.com and enter a search query, you will see the “Note this” option button beside the Cached and Similar Pages option.

Once, you click on “Note this” option near your search result, you see a “Duly noted” option.

Now, if you wish to see these snippets or rather search results you have been saving, you can log on to your Google Notebook account. There you will be able to see all the google search results you might have been saving. In your Google Notebook, a link to the site and a brief description of the URL you just noted will show up. Here, you can add a comment, and also change the URL of the site you just saved. If you wish to add notes from any webpage on the internet, you can download this browser extension provided by Google
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Google announced on it Adsense Blog a couple of hours ago that they have changed the way some of their ad units are displayed giving them a fresh new makeover. Google claims that this change is the result of extensive testing and research and that these new ad formats are more visually appealing, more cleaner and attractive for visitors besides providing better performance results for Adsense publishers and advertisers.

AdSense is an ad-serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis.

Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google’s targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

At AskStudent, we started seeing these new ad formats a couple of hours ago. Notice the way, ads are displayed in the old format and the brand new format.

Old Format

New Format

As you might have observed,  the ad units still match the site where the fonts and colors of the ads are still the same. The most important changes seem to be that Google has done away with the way it displays its Logo. Gone is Ads by Goooooogle and is replaced by a sleeker image which says Ads by Google.

Another option which has been removed which could be very significant is Advertise on this site option on Google Ads. When this option was introduced by Google a year ago, it allowed advertisers to bid on specific websites besides letting the advertisers see how their ads might show up. However, Google Adwords has matured a lot since it was launched and allows a lot of options for advertisers giving them all the control they need.

Besides,  Google expects visitors who click on Ads to take them to sites which ad value to the content they have been looking for and to get the answer they have been looking for on that article page and not necessarily advertisers looking to market their products at a particular site.

Below, is another example of the old format and new format of the Adsense units.

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Wow. Matt Cutts. <takes a bow>

As reported by SearchEngineLand and a number of blogs, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s WebSpam team, had his blog defaced by the Dark SEO Team over the weekend. Matt’s blog is down, hacked — and archives wiped out as well. Matt has posted previously to this about the site being slow (post gone, but you can see his Twitter comment here) and heading offline through Monday, so you might be seeing the screen below for awhile.

Now, Matt Cutts seems to have taken his sweet revenge. You can check it out yourself by visiting the Dark SEO’s website

The Content of the hack

Defaced by Matt ! I ownz you, Dark seo team !

Of course I’m lying when I make everyone believe that content is King.
Of course black hat SEO and spamdexing are the only Kings.
Google is just a stupid algorithm relying on spammy backlinks.
But you guys had no right to let everyone know. That’s why I defaced your bloody DST site. To show the entire world how evil a white hat can be.

In fact, I’m as evil as my employer

All your backlinks are belong to us !

Head of the Google’s Webspam team

Update: Matt Cutts and Dark SEO combined to make this a successful April Fools Joke. <takes a bow again>

Related Links:

In case you wish to view larger pictures, if Matt Cutts blog and Dark SEO’s website are restored to their original pristine glory

1. Matt Cutts Blog Defaced by Dark SEO

2. Matt Cutts defaces Dark SEO’s website

Looking for something fun to do this summer? All college and university students around the world are invited to apply to get paid $4,500 USD to work on your favorite open source project this summer.  This Blog is powered by WordPress and looks like it is only about to get even better.  WordPress is among the 131 accepted to Google Summer of Code, of more than 300 projects that applied.

It seems that Wordpress has eight committed volunteers who are enthusiastic to mentor, learn, and make WordPress a little better in the process.

Check out their ideas for projects, or propose your own. You must apply by March 24.

Good luck!

I was writing an article on how to use HTTP to view web banner information. My first choice was to use the big G, Google.com. However, when I used the command nc google.com 80 and used OPTIONS / HTTP/1.1, Google generated this error message.

It is also interesting to observe how Google generates its logo using the color codes.

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I am also a Security Editor at a very popular student portal AskStudent. Like most other portals, our operations are supported by Advertising and we use Google Adsense to take care of advertising on AskStudent. At AskStudent, we cover a lot of topics such as Security, Health, Career, Jobs, Coding, Money matters, Shopping etc. We also cover Sexual Health and Love and Relationships at AskStudent.

Last week, out of the blue, our Senior Editor gets an email from the Google Adsense Team

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://www.askstudent.com/2006/12/02/maturecontentpostataskstudent/?preview=true.

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.

Please make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3 business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Now, this was a problem. We did not know what Google treated as mature content. However, with respect to the post in question, it was justified. So the first step we did was remove all ads serving on AskStudent while we figured out a solution to this problem. At AskStudent, we use Adsense Deluxe plugin. If you don’t use this plugin and manually serve ads or hard coded the ads, then I would highly recommend using this plugin.

Now, There are two solutions to solving this problem of how to avoid serving ads on a mature content post but keep serving ads on the rest of the blog

Solution # 1: After disabling ads generation through Adsense Deluxe, you can manually copy and paste adsense code onto individual posts. However for a portal like AskStudent with hundreds of articles, this is almost a highly time consuming if not an impossible task.

Solution # 2: Perfect Solution: Code it up

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