Google

TextLinkAds are offering $100 of free text link ads. The catch? You have to buy $125 of advertising. The catch isn’t as big as you’d think. I assumed it meant you spend $125 and get another $100 free, but it doesn’t. You order $125 worth of advertising and only pay for $25. You still need to be careful though. You’re actually ordering a subscription and if you don’t cancel within a month you will be charged again.

TextLinkAds sell hard coded text links (oddly enough) on publishers websites. Hard coded means detectable by search engines. And you can get them at one fifth the “normal” price. To qualify just enter “New client” as the coupon code.

Firstly, after using it for a week I’ve concluded Google Analytics is good. I can’t reasonable access any of it on a dial-up connection but that should be an increasingly small problem. (Increasingly small? Almost as good as “it’s looking more and more less likely”.)

One thing it reveals is random search engine traffic I get for almost no reason. I posted about the April fools gag on GameFAQs and I’m now on the second page of Google if you search for GameFAQs. The funny (although understandable) bit it is that it’s my internal search page for GameFAQs that is actually in the results.

I had quick look at the source HTML on Google Analytics (specifically the first page: executive summary) and saw a piece of really bad markup: They had the whole page (HTML, HEAD, BODY, the lot) wrapped in a DIV tag… Naughty Google.

Well I now have to say that Google Analytics certainly looks impressive. It has all the stats that you would expect from anything and a heck of a load that you wouldn’t. The real gain is the way it is presented. All the stats can be quickly restricted to date ranges, you can compare two date ranges, most of the details can be combined arbitrarily (just see visitors from Spain using Internet Explorer on Macs for instances) as well as lots of other nifty things. It also has support for e-commerce tracking (including defining custom goals and ROI calculations) as well download and outbound link tracking.

And it’s free.

Well if you have more than 5 million hits a month you need to get a Google AdWords account which (at least when I signed up) needed a $5 deposit. But if you get 5 million hits a month I’d hope you could afford it.

One quick detail I discovered (without really looking for it). I get most of my traffic from search engines, however visitors from links from other sites visit more pages per visit.

I’ll post more as and when I find something particularly interesting to post (for instance I can’t test the date features with just one day of data).

Ooh, I’ve just been sent an invitation for Google Analytics. I can’t really say much about it yet since it takes 24 hours for data to appear.

It’s that day again, April 1st, and boy the internet make it more fun. And of course Google are at again. Personally I don’t think they’ll ever beat Pigeon-Rank but they have to try.

The first thing I have to point out about Google is be very careful around April 1st. They have launched a number of genuine services on April 1st (including Gmail) that turned out to be real. None the less I’m fairly sure Google Romance is less than sincere…

And another thing, GameFAQs have decided it’s bad to cheat.

Ooh, I checked another site of mine and suddenly noticed it had a PR of 4, instead of none.

For a long time my earnings with Google AdSense were very erratic - now they seem to have settled down. In fact for the past week I’ve gotten the equivalent of almost exactly $0.01 per impression. Now all I need is more traffic :)

P.S. Google spellchecker corrected “Adsense” to “AdSense”…

Google have a new project that could well replace half of their services, Google Base.

It’s a rather vague project designed to pursue their goal of organising the world’s information in the most direct way possible. Anyone can submit (almost) any information they want along with various attributes and labels describing the information and Google will make it searchable.

In theory Google Sitemaps and Froogle could just became specific version of this idea. The only limits on can be uploaded are fairly obvious matters of “decency”. Adult material does seem to be a allowed in general. The most eye catching item not allowed: “Posting is not permitted for the promotion of body parts or human remains.”

There are quite a few marketplace-type sites out there facilitating text link trading. I don’t mean link exchanges, I mean buying and selling text links.

I’ve read a few reports of high profile sites having their PageRank-passing-on-ability removed by Google because of this, but for the most part it’s probably safe. The main reason being so many sites are doing it that the skew caused by removing those sites could well be bigger than the skew caused by leaving them in. On the other hand, it may not be that much of a problem. Although it is a very suspect argument, you could say that a site willing to pay that much (and we’re talking upwards of $15 per month per link) must have something to offer.

At the moment it doesn’t always work like that since many sites are some sort of affiliate adding no new content or are domain-parking-like sites. People are becoming aware of these things though (it’s easy to spot such pages in Google’s own sponsored sites section of search results) and as such more useful sites are actually using this as a valid advertising source.

If you’re interested you might try Text Link Brokers or Linkworth. Linkworth have lots of little tools people can use without actually buying or selling any links and have no minimum PR, and are more open. Text Link Brokers have been at it for longer and have more high PR sites (some PR 8 sites with .gov back-links).