This was too good to pass up. The ?Ghoul?gle caricature of Larry and Sergey was created by GetElastic.com who I think did a pretty darn good job of it. You can also win a $100 gift certificate for Amazon.com by leaving the best caption in their comments. Just visit their site and drop a comment that you think best describes this picture to enter.

via: Neatorama

Well it appears we finally have the long awaited pagerank update, only it’s not exactly what everyone expected. A while ago, about 2 months to be exact, I checked iwebtools and RealityWired’s predicted pagerank was estimated to jump from a PR4 to a PR6. Cool beans. Then a few weeks ago people started noticing negative impacts and the rumors were it was related to text link sales. Rechecking my predictions, PR was stuck at 4 with little movement. Subsequently I dropped Text-Link-Ads from this blog, figuring that action was coming too late and if it truely was having the affect people were seeing the damage was done. This morning however, my Google toolbar showed our PR at 3. Yikes!

Reading around, that’s not the half of it. It seems that many people, including A-Listers one could argue are the mainstays have been hit with negative penalties. Some of the sites Google has put in the penalty box include (from http://andybeard.eu):

http://www.autoblog.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.engadget.com/ PR7 PR5
http://www.problogger.net/ PR6 PR4
http://www.copyblogger.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.joystiq.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.tuaw.com/ PR6 PR4

A few search and money related sites as examples

http://www.searchengineguide.com PR7 PR4
http://www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 PR4
http://www.johnchow.com PR6 PR4
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/ PR6 PR3
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ PR6 PR4
http://andybeard.eu PR5 PR3

That hurts and many the level of speculation has increased dramatically as to why the change. One thought occurs to me, maybe it’s not so much a penalty as it is a resetting of the scale where a PR6 was considered unobtainable not so long ago, it seems quite commonplace now, as was PR7. So maybe the importance of the scale has been adjusted and a PR3 still meets the same criteria it did when it was a 5 but on the new scale it’s just a 3.

Who knows. Like everything else the Google does it will most likely remain a mystery and discussions will be filled with speculation for months. One thing is for certain, it’s no longer lonely in the penalty box.

Update: The slide continues as we are down to a PR2. Yippie, I’m throwing a party.

While reading through my mail this morning I noticed that GMail had apparently bumped my storage limit up to 4GB. I didn’t “buy” any premium service or anything so I’m guessing this is a standardized move across the board. Anyone else noticed their storage capacity increased?

Here’s an interesting turn of events for all of us Adsense publishers out there. For now it seems to be just another beta test but the details behind it are pretty interesting if not a bit disheartening. I tried the CPA network when it first went into beta and had zero luck with it, so I stopped using it after about a month. Seems now, Google wants to integrate CPA ads in the current mix of CPC & CPM ads. The email below was sent to a publisher (not me) and it reads as if his account has been “drafted” into participating in this test. Check it out.

Dear Publisher,

Your account has been selected to participate in a limited test of an exciting new targeting feature for AdSense. In the next few days we will enable cost-per-action (CPA) ads to compete in your AdSense for content ad units on a limited portion of your traffic, 5% or less of all ad impressions. These ads will look identical to your current AdSense ads, so there will be no visible changes to you or your users.

Your account has been selected because we believe that you’ll earn more by having these additional targeted, high-quality ads competing in your ad units .

Rather than generating earnings for a click or impression, you’ll be paid a larger amount for each conversion with these new ads. A user who clicks on your ad must complete an advertiser-specified action, such as a purchase or a lead, in order for you to be paid. Remember that these ads do compete with cost-per-click and cost-per-thousand impression ads, so a CPA ad will only win in an auction when we expect it to perform better than a CPC or CPM ad.

You won’t notice any change to the way that your earnings are reported. Revenue from CPA ads will appear just as any other contextually targeted ad revenue is reported.

As a reminder, all information about this test is Google Confidential Information under the applicable Google AdSense terms and conditions.

If you have any questions about this test or would like to opt out of this experiment, please email us at adsense-support@google.com.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Ok, so this is probably not as drastic as it sounds and 5% isn’t that big of a deal but is it really fair to not give the publisher the choice on whether to participate or not? The up side is obviously more money for the publishers, but that means the CPA ads have to be worthwhile, because no matter how you slice it, 100 click worth .01 cent is worth well more than 1,000 CPA clicks that don’t convert to anything. The downside however is just that, how can Google honestly determine what would perform better on a particular site? Maybe a site that’s been doing fine with CPC ads, gets nothing but CPA ads that “should produce better” but don’t produce, what then?

One thing is for sure, this is one change that’s definitely worth keeping an eye on. What do you think? Would this be a good feature or not?

via: DigitalPoint