About two weeks ago it happened, icantinternet.org made the switch.
No, nothing weird happened, we didn’t switch from an internet blog to a blog about knitting, nor did we change our political views (should we have any).
No, we switched hosts.
Since the beginning of icantinternet.org, the blog was hosted with a lilttle webhosting company in the neighborhood. They were rather cheap, friendly, always ready to help, 99,9% online, fast, and they gave an enormous amount of webspace: 500Mb!!!
But in the meantime, years later, they still charge the same prices, for the same speed and the same amount of webspace. Their helpdesk went bad, their service did to, and their uptime went waaaaaaay down. You may have noticed these things happening in the last 6 months.
So, we went webhost shopping… After days of Googling, reading, and comparing, it appeared that Hostgator came out of the comparison as one of the best and most reliable webhosts.
So, we took out the shovle, started digging in code, files and databases, and made the switch.
Switching webhosts is never an easy thing, especially if you have 40+ domains, with 20+ websites. You are bound to run into some issues of some kind. However, the helpdesk of Hostgator is available via phone, but also via chat. I’ve used the chat version of the helpdesk a few times in the meantime, always during the nighttime for the US, and was always helped in a polite, fast and correct manner. That’s the way we like it!
Pricewise their packages may not be the cheapest, but they certainly aren’t the most expensive. To me it seems as good value for money, at least it sure is for what I need.
And uptime and speed, well, my sites load many times faster then before, and haven’t been offline for a single second that i know of (and yes, I’m monitoring), compared to 10 minutes downtime a day on average with my previous host.
All in all, I’m very pleased with my new webhost Hostgator.

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[ad]Humans are very visually oriented, that is why, and this will not come as a surprise to you, your first impression counts. This goes for meeting someone of the opposite sex, but it definately goes for your website. On different levels even!
First of all it’s important that your website looks nice and clean, well structured, not messy (in my case, don’t make the website a copy of my desk: a complete mess with piles everywhere). Nobody likes to read and follow a website which looks like crap, with bad colors and bad navigation and layout.

The second level is in the same line. As you most probably already know, a great way to increase your AdSense earnings is to place multiple ad units on your webpages (if they have enough content that is). However, when doing this, keep this title in mind: of the first impression people get from your blog or website is that its only purpoise is to trick the visitor into clucking the ads, then you fail. Your visitors aren’t stupid. They don’t fall for that, and will most probably leave your blog again.

The third level where this title fits, is in the same line as the second level (but not the first, great thinking huh? ). If you have multiple adsense units on your website, google will place the ads that are best performing in the first ad unit that they encounter! They know it too, the first impressionis very important. And they don’t particularly want you to succeed, but they want to auuccees, so they help you in this way.

[ad#r]Now, what does this mean? Well, google puts the ad that has won the adwords auction, and thus has the highest payout per click, first in your ad units. This means that (watch out! Math part coming!) if you get this ad with the highest pyout for your page, to show up in the ad-unit that has the highest clickthrough rate for your page, you will get the maximum revenue possible for your page! However, there is a small pitfall to watch out for: the first ad-unit is not necessarily the first ad-unit that shows up on your page, but is the first ad-unit that shows up in your code. Depending on the layout and setup of your site, CDs can trick you, and the first ad-unit to show up in the code can even be the last ad-unit showing on your website. So a minimum of codediving is necessary here!

I hope you found this article to be usefull, and if so, feel free to social bookmark it. Should you still have any questions, please feel free to ask them via the comments!

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A few weeks ago (on October 21 to be exact), Google and Twitter reached an agreement. An agreement which has quite some consequences for all twitter-users.

Google and Twitter agreed on showing not only the Twitter profile pages in Google search results, but also the individual tweets. What does this mean to us, mere bloggers? This means our chances to create backlinks increase dramatically.

[ad]So the next question is of course: how? Very important to remember: just like Google wants to see relevancy and authority in documents, blogs and webpages, it wants to see the same in tweets. Relevancy is shown by using keywords. In your profilepage, in your username, and in the hashtags. Yes indeed, hashags have kind of the same meaning as the keyword metadata tag in webpages, so use it wisely! Regarding the authority, that is shown in tweets through the amount of followers you have, the number of times the specific tweet has been retweeted, and inbound links to your profilepage (from anywhere on the web, not just twitter).

So, some tips to make the best of this:

- Choose a username and account name that are relevant to the content you want to share

- Make sure your bio and profile page are keyword-rich.

- Make sure your tweets are keyword-rich and have a prioritized sequence of keywords.

- Put backlinks to your content in your tweets using URL shortening services such as TinyURL, bit.ly and others.

But most of all, remember that the golden rule of search, that is, creating content that is valuable to your readers, applies maybe even more to Twitter. If you wish to follow me on twitter, go to http://twitter.com/icantinternet

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A whole lot of internet-marketing-gurus who are into AdSense will tell you that content is king, and that by having rich content on your Adsense sites you will gain more profit. This is of course very true. No content, no visitors, no adsense, no money, no food, no screaming babes waiting to go home with you. However, there are many secrets to increase your Adsense earnings.

[ad]But no… That’s not what I’m telling you. There are NO secrets to up you Adsense income! Nope, not one. All there is to know, has been shared already. And the real secrets, they’re only known to Google.
The only thing you should know about Adsense, is to experiment. Nothing else! There is no magic package to get rich. No secret setup, colorscheme, or ad-placement, that will guarantuee you to become rich on Adsense overnight.

What are the major ingredients for earning via adsense? Traffic, good ole, high quality traffic. Not bought traffic. Not a gazillion visitors that are hitting your homepage and leaving within 2 seconds. They only get your bouncerate to hit the ceiling. No, what you need it really targeted traffic. Get it via search engines through good SEO, get it via commenting on blogs and forums on your topic, or get it via any other way you can find in this tutorial, but get high quality traffic, even if you have to drag them down to your site! Guess what, do you want an Adsense secret? Well, here you have one: the CTR (Click Through Rate) of targeted traffic? Well, it’s higher! Who would’ve thought… But, the CTR of traffic coming from search engines seems to be even higher than of other traffic. And, to continue in our series of Search Engine Traffic and CTR, traffic coming from Bing (1,50%), seems to have a higher CTR than traffic coming from Google (0,97%) (which  has an even lower CTR than Yahoo! traffic (1.24%) (*Source: Chitika.com)).
Now that may not be a secret, but it sure is good info

Now, back to the original topic: Adsense secrets, and the one thing you should know: Experiment. Yes, I repeat: experiment!
[ad]Is your adsense income low? Try something new! What do you have to lose? If your earnings decrease even more, you change whatever you changed back to normal, and you should go back to your low earnings.
Now, what could you change? Try different colorschemes, blending in your ads more, or on the contrary, make them stand out more, experiment. Try different sizes of ads, try different placements.
But, do give your experiments time. Don’t go changing it back after 6 hours, or even 2 days. Give your experiments at least a week to be able to see and compare the results. Every hour of day, and every day of the week has its own clicking behaviour, so give it a full week to see if it makes a difference. The only reason to change back sooner is if you see your earnings take a dive towards the point of zero.

Now, go out, log in to your admin pages, and experiment! And once you’ve done that, share your results with us via the comments below.

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Do you want more visitors on your website? Do you need more incoming links? Gain  some quality traffic? And be honest, who doesn’t, right? Here we have for you 6 easy steps to increase your incoming links, your number of visitors, and even your Google Rankings in the end:

Step 1: Make sure you have plenty, high quality (means interesting for your visitors), unique (written yourself, not copied) content on your blog

Step 2: Write a few articles about your topic, and post them on article directories such as ezinearticles.com and such. This will create links towards your blog

Step 3: Write articles that answer peoples questions about the topic  on answers pages like answerbag, wiki answers or yahoo answers. Then answer their questions on those websites.[ad]

Step 4: Submit your website to directories such as dmoz.org and plenty of others

Step 5: Find other blogs about the same topic, and comment on their articles, make sure your comment adds something usefull, not just saying something like “great blog”. Put a link to your blog in your comment.

Step 6: submit your blog to sites like mybloglog.com and blogcatalog.com and get a good community of friends there.

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Image via Wikipedia

This was a Guest Post by Mr. I. He blogs about Blogging Tips and Resources at Blogging With Success blog. If you liked this post, consider subscribing to Blogging With Success Newsletter.

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[ad]You cannot get by telling people only about the bad stuff, so, I don’t only tell people about Google and Adsense Scams, but I try to tell them also that Adsense DOES work, and give loads of tips and tricks to increase your adsense earnings and to get more links and traffic to your website.

And these posts are warmly welcomed it seems. However, fairly recently, I started to get alot of mails saying “yeah, ok, these Google Adsense Scams suck, and you tell me that Adsense on its own works well, and you even give apparently great tips to improve your Adsense earnings, but… How on earth do I even start earning with Adsense? Do I need a website? Do I need an account somewhere? Please help me step by step from the beginning!”

Now… what we could do here, is hit the delete-button, sighing “oh my whoever”, and go on surfing the net for other more or less welcome brainless timewaster-websites. Or, we can think about it, and acknowledge that at one time in the history of mankind, we ourselves were non-connaiseurs of the whole Adsense system. And we can then write a blogpost with step by step information for the newbies!

I decided to do the first!

And after I got bored with the beauty of mankind, I decided to skip to the latter, and write that info for you! Yes, that is for you, who came here on this blog in search of info on how to start earning your first pennies (yes, it won’t be much more than that in the beginning), with Google’s Adsense.

So, how do you get started earning with Adsense?

The short version (credit to Mr. I for his words of wisdom in the comments section of Google Scams):

1. Get a free website/blog.
2. Its very easy to set up blog and after that, you need to write (regularly) about anything you like.
3. Go to AdSense.com and log in with Google(GMail) account. Submit your blog(after writing some good articles on blog).
4. Once accepted, you can add ads to Blog from Layout –> Add Element –>AdSense.

The long version:

1. Get yourself a website. You can get a free website/blog at http://blogger.com, or various others (do check if they allow for Adsense to be published by users! Apparently http://wordpress.com doesn’t allow that). If you are serious about this whole earning money with your website thing, than invest a small amount of money, and buy a domainname and a small hostingpackage (http://www.godaddy.com is quite good and cheap for this). [ad]Make sure you can install wordpress on your webspace (php and mysql needed). Many webhosts offer WordPress in their webhostingpackage already, ask them to find out. Regarding the domainname, try to have the keywords in the domainname for the subject your website/blog will be about.

2. Start writing articles for your blog. Make sure they have valuable content, and they are unique. Don’t just blindly copy content from other websites, you will not catch too many readers with it, and Google doesn’t like it either. Best thing is to blog about your own experience and knowledge. Therefor the easiest thing is to blog about something you like doing, or you are a fan of, or simply know alot about.

3. Once you’ve written a busload of articles, go to http://www.google.com/adsense, and register for an account.

4. When you are accepted for Adsense, you can put Adsense ads on your blog. If you are using blogger, follow the steps from the short version above. If you are using WordPress, there are numerous plugins that can help you putting adsense on your blog, Adsense Manager being only one of them.

5. Don’t stop putting new high quality content on your blog, earning via adsense is not the same as being lazy, you need to constantly update your websites, or you will see a decrease in earning eventually.

6. Get out on the internet, and start gathering a whole, but I mean a whole lot of links, pointing to your blog. Make sure they point to your mainpage, as well as to individual posts (which is called deeplinking).

7. Try to get as much visitors to your website as you can, do this in any imageinable (but legal, and according to Google’s laws) way you can, even by putting a sticker with your URL on your car or on your forehead!

8. Read Adsense is math to fully understand why visitors are important, and how you can increase your earnings, and measure your adsense-details.

9. Create additional blogs with Adsense (once your account is approved, you can put Adsense on any website you own, as long as it is Adsense TOS compliant).

10. Link to this post from everywhere you can

Ok, I admit, that last one is not completely right, but I wanted to make it a nice round number
Feel free to add or ask in the comments!

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It still isn’t alot, but at least we already got a little more from Google. Since today, you can change the fonts of your Adsense ads.

[ad]Don’t worry, you will not have to try for hours and hours, uploading all your 528 favorite fonts, checking which one fits best with the content on that specific page, and which one goes best with the content of that other page you have. Google only allows Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. So not too much choice. But hey! It’s better then it was before, and one of those three should be sufficient to fit your site more or less, no?

You can find the font-option underneath the colorsettings, when you create a new ad, or when you configure your old ads:

More info about the new selectable fonts in Adsense can be found on the Adsense blog:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/02/fontastic-new-options-for-your-ad-units.html

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Canonical URL Tags, the most important thing since the coming of sitemaps.

Ok, got it, but what are they??? What do canonical url tags do?? And how should I use those canonical url tags?

Let me explain:

Yahoo!, Live & Google recently announced that they will be supporting a new “canonical url tag”.

According to Wikipedia, canonical means: reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality.

Translate this to the life of a webmaster, and you may get something like: reducing the url to its most basic value, which is still valid for its content. Now, does that make any sense? Yes, it does in fact.

[ad]Since search engines cannot guess if a url such as http://www.icantinternet.org/?p=177 and http://www.icantinternet.org/?p=155 are basically pointing to a totally different page, or if the parameters (all that is coming after the questionmark ‘?’ ) are only there for statistical purposes, or to identify a sessionid, or a user’s preference, and point to the (more or less) same page, this new canonical url tag can come in very handy. It can help us, webmasters, to remove the self created duplicated content, and thus (very important part here, listen to the rolling drums!)… transfer our linkjuice from all these until now separated urls, onto the one baseline url to which it belongs!

The problems search engines pre-canonical url tag had with this type of duplicate content is

1. They don’t know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices
2. They don’t know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
3. They don’t know which version(s) to rank for query results

You can easily see that this will make your website suffer in rankings and traffic losses and engines suffer lowered relevancy.

All this can now easily be solved by using the canonical url tag.

So, you wonder, how do I use it then?

Easy as this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.icantinternet.org/">

Each page that has this in its HTML header (where you also find the Title attribute and Meta Description tag), will transfer its link juice to the page to which the canonical url links, assumed that the content is similar.

The Canonical URL tag is similar to a 301 redirect, since you’re telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one, without actually redirecting your human visitors to the new URL, as a 301 would do. The main differences between a 301 redirect and the canonical url tag are:

• Whereas a 301 redirect re-points all traffic (bots and human visitors), the Canonical URL tag is just for engines, meaning you can still separately track visitors to the unique URL versions.
• A 301 is a much stronger signal that multiple pages have a single, canonical source. While the engines are certainly planning to support this new tag and trust the intent of site owners, there will be limitations. Content analysis and other algorithmic metrics will be applied to ensure that a site owner hasn’t mistakenly or manipulatively applied the tag, and we certainly expect to see mistaken use of the tag, resulting in the engines maintaining those separate URLs in their indices (meaning site owners would experience the same problems as before).
• 301 redirects can work cross-domain, so you can redirect a page at domain1.com to domain2.com and carry over those search engine metrics. This does not work with the Canonical URL tag, which operates exclusively on a single root domain (it does work across subfolders and subdomains).

And to close this article, some interesting quotes from the three search engines that announced this new “canonical url tag”.

From Google:

Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.

Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.

What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.

What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.

Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.

What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.

from Yahoo!:

• The URL paths in the <link> tag can be absolute or relative, though we recommend using absolute paths to avoid any chance of errors.

• A <link> tag can only point to a canonical URL form within the same domain and not across domains. For example, a tag on http://test.example.com can point to a URL on http://www.example.com but not on http://yahoo.com or any other domain.

• The <link> tag will be treated similarly to a 301 redirect, in terms of transferring link references and other effects to the canonical form of the page.

• We will use the tag information as provided, but we’ll also use algorithmic mechanisms to avoid situations where we think the tag was not used as intended. For example, if the canonical form is non-existent, returns an error or a 404, or if the content on the source and target was substantially distinct and unique, the canonical link may be considered erroneous and deferred.

• The tag is transitive. That is, if URL A marks B as canonical, and B marks C as canonical, we’ll treat C as canonical for both A and B, though we will break infinite chains and other issues.

and from Live/MSN:

• This tag will be interpreted as a hint by Live Search, not as a command. We’ll evaluate this in the context of all the other information we know about the website and try and make the best determination of the canonical URL. This will help us handle any potential implementation errors or abuse of this tag.
• You can use relative or absolute URLs in the “href” attribute of the link tag.
• The page and the URL in the “href” attribute must be on the same domain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx”, and the ”href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://mysite2.com”, the tag will be invalid and ignored.
  • However, the “href” attribute can point to a different subdomain. For example, if the page is found on “http://mysite.com/default.aspx” and the “href” attribute in the link tag points to “http://www.mysite.com”, the tag will be considered valid.
• Live Search expects to implement support for this feature sometime in the near future.

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Yes, it does, so indeed, it means that if you are working on your website, or set it as your homepage or something like that, it will count your visit everytime, and might potentially skew up your statistics. How bad your statistics are skewed is relative to the number of real visitors you have. If your website gets 100.000 visitors a day, then 1 more or less is only a very small percentage. However, if your website only gets 3 visitors a day…

[ad]Analytics does allow you to filter out certain IP addresses, but since your IP address is most probably dynamic, and shared with other users from the same provider, this may potentially also skew up your data.

Another way to prevent Google Analytics to count your visits is to add a simple line to your Windows Host file:

# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

This will redirect all calls to www.google-analytics.com (where the little piece of Analytics JavaScript is trying to go to) to 127.0.0.1, which is your own computer, and thus leave it not counting you.

The Windows host file can be found here:

Windows 95/98/Me c:\windows\hosts
Windows NT/2000/XP Pro c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Windows XP Home c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

A last trick is to disable JavaScript, since analytics gathers its data through a JavaScript script. However, this and the previous method, will also stop other sites from counting your visits, and they can use this data very well to improve their websites.
BTW: this last point also means indeed that visitors of your website who have JavaScript disabled, are not visible in your Analytics stats…

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