PageRank Bug or a miracle?

While for some of the webmasters the last few days can be the most happy day in their short life, some of them are crying at the doors of the Google Dome for a good answer.

Why? Google’s tenth birthday resulted a worldwide Page Rank update in the Google datacenters, which made some webmasters go mad, because sites with a page rank of 6 or even more suddenly dropped to 3-4.
And why some webmasters are happy? Because their domains got extremely high rankings. I saw people whos websites with no 0 or no page rank suddenly got a page rank of 3-4 or even higher.
My case is even weirder. One of the domains I use for development purposes, never opened for the public and behind a HTTP authentication, all of sudden got a PR 8? I guess that’s , well, weird.

The recent page rank update it seems started the day before yesterday, so that makes Friday, September 26, 2008. In a moment all the sites I visit on a daily basis had their page ranks changed.
How do I check page rank? That’s simple: Google Toolbar.
By the way, which is more plausible: Google updated the PageRanks and for some websites they were extremely generous, or as they also released the new Google Toolbar, they adjusted something in the algorithm which calculates the PageRank , and they accidentally coded a bug in the algorithm?

Toshiba Satellite L300 - only if you can ignore the headaches

And I mean, really only if you can ignore them. This review of the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300 EZ1004X, or test, or call however you want, will not convince you about to buy this notebook, the contrary: I would recommend this Satellite only for my foes.

First impressions about the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

Why did Toshiba release this notebook? It was a must: the ever dropping prices of the notebook PCs forced Toshiba to release a notebook which fits in the cheap category. Its price is low, just as its performance.
The Toshiba Satellite’s case is borrowed from the higher-end notebooks, thus it’s very neat. It’s made of hard plastic, its touch is very cool for some reason. The keyboard is standard notebook keyboard with the standard “Fn” key to access the 3rd functions of some keys. And here comes the first issue with the laptop: the Fn key won’t work if you don’t have appropriate drivers installed. Imagine DOS environment, you think the display is too dark and want to make it brighter. Forget it, your only solution is to switch the lamp on in the room you are in.
Or better not, because the Satellite L300 doesn’t have anti-glare layer on the WXGA display, thus it functions just like a mirror.

Hardware performance of the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

The processor of the Toshiba Satellite L300 is an Intel Pentium Dual Core T2370, working at 1.7 GHz on full load. The front side bus works at 533 MHz and has 1MB of cache. So, the processor is a high performance gadget, and also an extremely neat thing if you want to heat up your room. Playing a game, for example World of Warcraft resulted an incredible processor temperature, around 70 degrees Celsius. You might argue that this is not much at all, but if you’d tested the notebooks I tested before this one, you’d be convinced that this is much.
The Toshiba Satellite L300 is shipped with 1GB of RAM, and an Intel GMA X3100. The interesting thing about the Intel GMA X3100 is that you have to install the appropriate and specific drivers before you can set how much VRAM would you like it to use. Normally, under Vista it will use up to 358MB, value decided by Vista, not the user. Under XP it varies between 8 MB (yeah, eight) and 128MB. I’m not sure how XP decided how much to use, I didn’t get it yet. First it used 8Megs, then on the next boot it decided to use 128, than back to 8. Like Russian roulette: you never know what you get.
Viewing a HD (720p) movie was painless on the other hand. The 24/25 FPS limit was reached always so all I saw was flawless play.
Gaming on the other hand, you can forget from the start. I tested the Toshiba Satellite L300 with The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and Counter Strike. I tested so you won’t have to. It can be very dangerous, especially Counter Strike. As soon as I pushed a button, the game freeze, basically it started to think for a long time, making the playing and the quitting a pain. WoW was better a bit, but I wouldn’t recommend. Oblivion freeze at the very beginning, so that wouldn’t run either.

Various operating systems and the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

The Satellite L300 I got came with Vista Home Premium already installed. After I turned it on, the first impression was that it’s extremely noisy. Very noisy. The hard disk was the faulty and as I later observed, if you access a directory on the hard disk which has many files, the hard disk becomes even noisier.
Installing XP happened without any issue. This doesn’t mean later didn’t appear problems. The only thing which was recognized by XP was the camera integrated in the case. Not that it was a problem. A quick browsing on the manufacturer’s website resulted all the possible drivers for XP.

The verdict on the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

Its price is still lower than a HP’s, around $500-$600 + VAT, and this will be falling rapidly. The price doesn’t mean the Toshiba Satellite L300 is a “must buy”, it’s exactly the opposite. If you are my foe, buy it, else do not. The battery lasts for only about one hour whatever you do, it’s noisy, slow and a heat pad also comes handy.

Its usage asks for some basic things: if you are a smoker, get a pack of cigs, in addition you will need a pack of Aspirins too, to calm the headache down.

Do you have a Toshiba L300 notebook? What do you think about it?

The Benq Joybook A52… Should make you happy

Another cheap notebook. Since I played a lot with the HP EliteBook I fear a bit to start testing a low-price notebook.

With the fear of the headaches caused by a cheap thing, I started the test of the Benq JoyBook A52.

First impressions about the JoyBook A52

Nice, black case, with standard notebook keyboard. Typing on it is a pleasure, the keys of the JoyBook A52’s are very soft.
The anti-glare layer on the WXGA display performs very well, even in very bright environment is easy to watch a movie for example. The picture you get is always high quality, the text is sharp and the brightness of the JoyBook’s display can be adjusted on a wide range, function which can be very useful for travelers.
The touchpad is extremely sensitive, even from half an inch senses the finger, this can be very annoying as while navigating on the internet I encountered situations when the notebook thought I clicked and followed links normally I would not follow. There are only two buttons attached to the Benq JoyBook A52’s touchpad, I got used to the 3rd mouse button, so I felt the need of the missing button many times.

The Benq JoyBook A52’s hardware

The Joybook A52 I tested has an Intel Core Duo T2250 processor, with a FSB working at 533 MHz and with a generous, 2 Megabytes of cache. It has 1 Gigabyte of RAM, so in combination with the processor, the JoyBook A52 can perform very well in the office, in the hands of a web-developer, on the internet in media-rich and Web 2.0 applications or even in the hands of a user which uses its notebook for watching HD movies. As usually, I don’t recommend this notebook for gaming. I tested the Benq JoyBook A52 this time with 2 games: World of Warcraft and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. The first, World of Warcraft performed very well, the latter, Oblivion, very poor, even if the details of the graphics were set to “Low detail”. The low performance can be the result of the Joybook A52’s video card, which, let’s be realistic, it’s not designed explicitly for gaming. The video card is a ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, the mobile edition of the infamous Radeon Xpress. In the mobile edition the video memory is shared and the maximum you can set to is only 128 MegaBytes. Which is not enough for most of the games.

HD movies and the Benq JoyBook A52

The Joybook A52 passed my HD-movie test with ease. The video I tested with was a HD 720p, read, the lower end of the HD videos. The play was very smooth, always above 24 FPS, this means the human eye recognizes the motion as a real action, it’s flawless.
The VGA port on the JoyBook A52 comes handy when you want to link the notebook to a plasma display, a CRT or LCD monitor. Viewing the movies played on the Benq A52 and viewed on a plasma display can be a very cool experience.

Installing various operating systems on the Benq JoyBook A52

The JoyBook A52 notebook is Vista-ready. This tells a lot, for example the fact that installing other operating systems can be a real headache.
By default, the notebook is shipped with Window Vista Home Basic. Switching to other OS can be done without any greater issue. The first step always is to download all the possible drivers from a Benq website, I found everything I needed on the German Benq website. XP will not recognize everything from the start nor has drivers for every hardware in the JoyBook A52, so if you forgot to download the drivers for XP and you have LAN broadband internet, it can be a headache to get the drivers after install. Be sure to download every driver *before* installing XP.

If you want to install a Linux distro, better forget it. There are NO drivers for *any* Linux.

The autonomy of the JoyBook A52

It’s more than worse. If I left the JoyBook A52 alone, it resisted on batteries 41 minutes. Running a video worsened the situation and almost halved the autonomy of the batteries. Running a game on batteries, is a bad idea anyway, but in a bit more than 10 minutes the batteries were empty.
The difference between Vista’s and XP’s power management is extremely big. While Vista produced the above performance (if we can call that performance), XP lasted on batteries about 20-25% less in the above mentioned situations.
So, the 4 cell Lithium-ion batteries are not enough for the Benq Joybook A52, at all.

Verdict on the Benq Joybook A52

The price of the Benq JoyBook A52 is around $500+VAT where I live. Its price in comparison with its performance I’d say it’s excellent.
Would I recommend it? Definitely yes.

Get at least $1 per click with AdSense, hacking the relation between AdSense and AdWords

This article will be weird a bit, but in the same time very logical.
I’m an AdWords publisher, we create ads which appear in the search engines’ sponsored results or on thee content network, on AdSense publisher’s websites.
It was a hard way to learn that some keywords we are bidding on, cost a lot for us. Basically, because of bidding. AdWords is just an auction site, the only difference between Ebay and AdWords is that we don’t bid on items, but on keywords. Due to the bidding, some keywords are very expensive.

An example: I wrote an article about asbestos insulation in a PC case. If I would like to advertise that article using AdWords, I would bid on keywords like these:

• asbestos
• fireproof insulation
• mesothelioma
• asbestos cancer
• etc.

There is a problem with these keywords, specifically that I have to bid over $50 to $70 to use them. That means that if somebody clicks my ad, I will pay up to $70, for one single click.
And here comes the relation between AdWords and AdSense. While the AdSense publisher on whom website my advertisement was clicked will not get all that money because AdWords has a quite high commission, it will still get much more than the usual $0.05 or $0.1 .
So, we, AdSense publishers might get an idea which keywords pay better, and write articles or post content related to those keywords. Be aware though, that the webmaster guidelines states that we should publish our content for the User, you who reads this article, not for search engines or revenue centered, in our case to get better CPC in AdSense. But what if the article actually IS interesting? I guess then the above guideline is not applied on us.

Highest Paying AdSense Keywords

Do exist such a list? The answer is disappointing: no, there’s no such list, and can’t really exist. The lists you can find all over the net either for free or for money are useless, because the AdWords advertisers are constantly changing the ads, they bid on different keywords each day or week, so if I publish now a list of highest paying keywords, in a week or even in a few days it will become outdated, useless.
One thing is sure though. Even though the keywords are constantly changing, the highest paying keywords will always be related to the following things:

• Asbestos, related illnesses and services
• Auto insurance
• Life insurance
• Loans and related services
• Lawyers
• Cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles and Florida

While you can write articles related to the above keywords with the scope of getting better CPC it’s not a very wise act. You should write your content for your users, to be interesting for the users. If you write articles with the scope of high revenue and it’s not interesting for your users, you basically cut the tree under yourself.

While you may argue on the truth of this article, keep in mind that I tested this phenomena and I wrote about my own experience.

The myth of the AdSense Premium publishers

Is this true?

Of course is true. But let’s clear some things up, because many confuses AdSense Premium Publisher with an AdSense account being invited in the optimization team. So, basically there are three clans, not two as many believed. I am a standard publisher, that’s why I can disclose some information about the other two clans. Well, only one as the Optimization Team is not interesting. And how do I got the information I will share now? Hmm, let’s say I know someone who is a Premium Publisher and he said one two things, which I am very grateful for.

So, how can someone get in the higher clans. This will be a great disappointment: it’s invitation based. You can search Google’s help articles until hurts, but you won’t find any information about the AdSense Optimization and Premium Publisher accounts. When you, better said your account meets some conditions, you will be invited to be part of the clan.

Conditions of being an AdSense Premium Publisher

First, let’s see some examples of AdSense Premium Publishers. Some Premium Publishers are (be aware that this is not an exhaustive list, just some examples) : Times, CNN, AOL, etc.
What is common on the above mentioned sites? They all get millions of visitors, daily. This is the condition most of us can only dream of. Many says you have to get users from 5 million search queries or 20 million page views. While this sounds logical, it’s doesn’t really true. The truth is that you have to have incredibly high number of visitors, more million of users to visit your site on daily basis. It’s not a fixed number. Your CTR also has to be outstanding, just as your CSS. You may wonder how, if the ads are coming through an IFrame generated by a remote Javascript.
And here comes the best part: they can choose whether the ads to be served as the usual HTML as we get the ads, or by Javascript. The latter means that a simple Javascript function is placed in the HTML of their pages. If you want to take a closer look on the Javascript, you can find it here: Premium Publisher’s Javascript Code. If the ads are served via this Javascript, they can generate their own ad structure, they can render the ads in a table, in a div, in whatever they want. The Javascript function from the above page will be used in the request which the ads are served through. If an AdSense account is enabled for serving through JavaScript, and only then. We, commoners can not use that function, no matter what.

So, the first obvious advantage is that they can edit their ads via CSS, this is the greatest advantage.

The second, i guess is that they can remove or edit the “Ads by Google” link from the ads which appear on their sites. Sincerely, I have nothing against that little link, more than that, if we’d all remove it, we’d confuse our users to hell, they wouldn’t know, or couldn’t make a difference between what’s an advertisement and what’s a common link.

The Adsense Premium Publishers can also choose how many ads to display on their website and in a specific ad-block too. Technically it’s possible, to get a page similar to a Google search result page, but with the difference that all the links would be advertisements. Again, I would be against this. This is, again, confusing for the user and is not good at all.

They also get a personal account manager and special technical support. The latter I didn’t realize yet what is used for, frankly, even a 5-year-old can copy-paste the ad code in the HTML, whatever. The personal account manager on the other hand can be useful. The Premium Publisher can ask about everything either by phone or email, starting from optimization tips to general how-to, everything related to AdSense.

Did you wonder why do you get only one cent per click? Would you like to filter out the ads which pays only a cent? The AdSense Premium Publishers can do it, and I think that’s their greatest benefit.

How much the premium publishers earn?

Due the optimization on their sites the CTR is higher with about 300-400% than the usual. That means, they can have incredibly high CTRs from 10% to 30% anywhere. Let’s say they get 5 million impressions. The 10% of 5 million is 500,000 (yeah, five hundred thousand) clicks… per day. Let’s say they get only 5 cents per click, that means 25,000 US dollars… again, per day. Go figure further…

Earn more with Adsense - Boosting Click Through Rate (CTR)

I will say nothing you didn’t hear yet. The only difference I think that this time you will hear my own experience, not the niche you can find everywhere.

First of all, you have to have traffic. If you don’t have traffic, you have no revenue… In adsense terms, there are no impressions. My experience is that you have to have at least 100 visitors on daily basis, to notice that you actually have some revenue. With 100 visitors your earning will be low, but there will be revenue and the feeling is very cool.
By the way, did I mention you have to have a website or blog.

Placing the ads AKA ad placement

This can be a massive factor and there are two possibilities: you place the ads in wrong places where you have low Click-through-Rate (CTR), or you place in the wrong place and you have low CTR. Simple as 123.
So what do I think about ad placements? I give examples, that’s the easiest way to explain. Each link opens in new window or tab so you are not distracted from this page.
First, I assume you have a menu on your website. Either a horizontal menu bar or links on a sidebar, where the navigation menu is placed vertically.
If you have a horizontal menu, you can create a horizontal link unit which you place below or above the menu. An example: http://hotnews-4u.com/. As You see, in the upper side of the page there’s a link unit, which performs very well, having a CTR always above 2%. Which is extremely good CTR.
For vertical example: this site. Look on the right side of the page, below the search box. A small ad unit, but with fair CTR. It’s always around 1%, sometimes a bit below, sometimes a bit above. I consider this CTR good because there are ads which are around 0% somewhere, so 1% is fair.
Another thing you can try is to place ads into the post. Like here: Emachines e510 Notebook Review. As you see, at the very beginning of the post there is an ad unit on the upper right corner. From this website, that’s the best performing the best, having a CTR of around 3%. Which is more than good.
If you scroll a bit down, you will see some ad units. That ad is also performing better than I expected, having a CTR of around 2.5%.
So, conclusion: To have a great CTR, the best positions are around the navigation menus and inside the content. That’s not a news, that’s what the Adsense optimization tips says, too.
But what it doesn’t say, that it does matter on which side you put an ad unit in your content! I’m not a ad marketing genius, so I tested something which shocked me. Here: Emachines e510 Notebook Review, the ad unit was on the left side of the post. As soon as I changed its location and pushed it to the right, it’s CTR has been boosted from ~1.5% to 3%! Why, I have no idea, but it has been doubled just because I changed the float value from left to right. Does this method always double your CTR? I have no idea. Test it and you will know. If possible report back, cos I’d be interested, too.

Having the right color AKA ad blending

Now this is weird. Or not. The optimization tips of AdSense says that webmasters should set the colors of the ads in a way to have the ads seamlessly integrated in the website’s color palette. That’s logical for me, but the some things were not. I elaborate, don’t worry.
An ad unit has three visible text portions. These are the title, the text and the URL. First I had the title color and the URL color similar to the colors used on Devoracles for the anchors. Both were some sort of orange, but they were not identical. The CTR was lower though. On a rainy day I decided to adjust these colors to be identical, now both the URLs on Devoracles and the titles of the ads are the same color. The CTR has been boosted a bit, not much though.
Look to the ads in Emachines e510 Notebook Review. I decided to set the URL to a color which is completely indifferent. In my case something which is almost the background color, cos the AdSense engine doesn’t let you to set it exactly to the background color. As soon as the color has been changed, the CTR arrived to its current state, around 3%.
So, conclusion: The color of the title and the text should be exactly the same as the color of the URLs and text on your website, the URL on the other hand something which is almost invisible.

An interesting thing

The other day I found a blog-post at Scratch99. Stephen, the author talks about the AdSense Smart Pricing, which basically (and in short) means that we, publishers don’t get the maximum possible PPC rate. So while the AdWords advertiser pays a lot for a given keyword, let’s say $50 (yeah, 50 US dollars per click), we, publishers receive only its tiny bit, usually 1 dam cent.
This is reflected on one of my post where I talk about a PC case which has been fireproofed using asbestos. Asbestos and the related keywords are extremely expensive, I think the US lawyers pushed the price in the skies, but that’s not relevant now. So, I received some clicks on the above mentioned post and what I earned? 1 cent per click, which is surrealistic, unfair and disappointing.
To learn what is and how you can avoid the Smart Pricing, read Stephen’s post on his blog.

XHTML Strict incompatible with target attribute: FALSE

Clients… I had to create a website… XHTML Strict… AND opening all links in a new tab/window.
No probs, there’s the target attribute of the anchor elements! But not in XHTML Strict!
W3 states clearly that target attributes should be forgotten and avoided. Why, I have no idea, but if you want to create XHTML Strict pages, you can forget about the target attribute.

So let’s hack with Javascript this rule! Rules are set to have something to brake, that’s what we’ll do now. This is very simple code, basically a single function which loops through the document and adds to all the anchor elements the “target=’_blank’” attribute. As it’s created with Javascript, the XHTML validators should not observe. I think they won’t observe, so first check it out somewhere.

So, the Javascript code to open links in new window/tab while maintaining the XHTML Strict compliance is:

function open_in_new_tab() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName){
return;
/*If the browser doesn't support DOM, do nothing*/
}
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
/*Select all the 'a' tags, anchors*/
for (var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++) {
var links = anchors[i];
if (links.getAttribute("href")){
/*every anchor with 'href' attribute will get a new attribute,
only those with 'href' attribute set because we don't want
to mess with the section anchors, for example*/
links.target = "_blank";
}
}
}
window.onload = open_in_new_tab;
/*finally load the function on page load*/

And the word is saved again.

Earning more with AdSense tip: Grab the hot trends

Now this is weird. I’ve read somewhere, don’t ask me where though, that if you have a page displaying the Google HotTrends and placing near them AdSense ad blocks will give some extremely good results.

As an AdWords user, I say this is not true as it’s not a rule that the keywords from the HotTrends have higher cost per click.

Anyway, I made a little experiment. I grabbed the HotTrends Atom feed with Magpie RSS parser then placed near them two Adsense adverts: a Skyscraper and a Link unit. On this page that content is brought with an IFrame, because I don’t want the AdSense BOT to crawl for keywords other than the HotTrends’. As AdSense Mediabot can’t brake out of an IFrame, it’s perfect for this situation.
I have a small concern about the experiment violating some AdSense policy, specifically the “content-less page” part. Whatever, I hope it doesn’t. I would write them an e-mail asking for permission but I usually don’t get answer, so I just don’t write. Whatever.

Let’s see the IFramed Trends:

The trends you see, that’s sure. If on the right side of the trends you see some big red blocks, it means there was no content the AdSense BOT can crawl, thus will display alternate color.

If there are ads, all’s good. Will report how they performed if there will be earning resulting from the trends’ ads. Or that’s another policy issue?

How much page views and hits do you get?

I was wondering about this for long and what I see is only the servers’ hits I manage.

What about you? Do you know a rough number, or if you don’t want to tell this precious info, when was the most hits you got and what caused the high number of visits?

If a conversation starts I will add devoracles’s details too

Javascript pop-up windows and parent page refreshing

This subject is quite interesting and i was searching for examples for long. Then I managed to do something, true that only by combining many examples i’ve found.

Let’s see the code then I’ll try to explain everything.

function popUp(URL) {
window.open(URL, 'WindowName', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=1,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=300,height=400');
}
window.onload = popUp("http://example.com");

The above function will pop-up window which will contain the page you put as value in the popUp function. I’ve put http://example.com, you put whatever you like, but preferably from your own domain if you want to have access to the pop-up’s DOM. You can play with the toolbar,scrollbars,location variables till hurts, basically they define how the popped up window will look and act. I wrote the above script so to pop the window up when the page loads (window.onload) , if you don’t like that and the fact that this even is blocked by most pop-up blockers, you can put a HTML button or link somewhere in the page, like this:

Pop Up the window

As I said before, there’s a slight issue with the stuff if you use the window.onload, specifically that your pop-up much likely will be blocked by pop-up blockers. You don’t want that, and even if it succeeds to pop-up, it’s annoying for the visitor, so just don’t do it, please.

OK, now let’s see the the parent window refreshing. Prent window is the page which pop-up up the small window. The pop-up window is the child. Usually, we use the parent refresh if we want to transfer a variable from the pop-up to the parent. The script which has to be placed in the child, popped up window is the following script:

function Parent() {
  window.opener.location.href = window.opener.location.href;
  if (window.opener.progressWindow){
    window.opener.progressWindow.close()
  }
  window.close();
}

and the button or link which closes and refreshes the parent window is

Click here to close this window and refresh the parent

A working example is situated here. It’s a loop so if your pop-up blocker doesn’t block the first pop-up, most likely you’ll get annoyed in no time.

And I think that was all. You can also transfer variables from one window to other, but that’s for another day… so, the show is over… there’s nothing to see here, pass over please.