A few days ago my own pagerank here on the jangro.com homepage dropped from 6 to 4. I was always a little dubious over my ranking of 6, so it must have been a very weak 6. Therefore, a 2 point drop isn't that surprising. In comparison, Jeremy mentioned recently that Shoemoney.com just dropped from 6 to 5. At least I'm in good company.

Zappos has employed a co-branding marketing strategy. They've set up many sub-domains and skinned them with a different header and navigation. Some

Got an email yesterday from the Google Adsense team with some great news that one of my sites may be included in their "custom placement packs program".

Custom placement packs are selections of individually-reviewed sites designed for our largest brand advertisers.

I'm impressed. thank you. puffs up chest

We would like to feature your site

We noticed a precipitous drop in the past few days in our Google traffic on one well-indexed site.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a problem that we're having where the Adwords Keyword Insertion function was not working properly . Apparently it's working just fine, or at least as Google has designed it.

To recap, in the ad text, you can put the following notiation:

{Keyword:Default text}

and it will insert into your google ad the

Inside the hurricane of the latest Google Adwords Quality Score update is a strange little twister that's causing us big problems, and perhaps going unnoticed for many.

It's pretty well known by now that in the ad text, you can put the following notiation:

{Keyword:Default text}

That will insert into your google ad the text of the keyword

I'm presenting this week at Commission Junction's CJU in a session titled, "Site Lab: Designing Effective Landing Pages". I'm actually co-presenting with Pedro Sostre. Pedro, being the creative designer type, and I being a geek an engineer/developer, we split our presentation along those lines. We'll be looking at actual ordinary websites

Let's talk about something other than CJ Javascript links for a bit...

Recently, Google updated their Webmaster Quality Guidelines to add a second bullet aimed toward affiliates. Peter Figueredo at Revenues writes that Google Only Wants Affiliates Who "Add Value" and talks about this change (second bullet, bold added):

• Avoid "doorway"

First reported by Greg Boser on his SEO Rockstars radio show, it seems that Google's Media-Partner bot is now being used for feeding the index.

Word out of the presently-running WebmasterWorld conference is that Matt Cutts of Google confirms that this is the case. Shoemoney reports that "Matt said it is a bandwidth saving feature to have

Finally and hopefully we can see some significant competition for Google Adsense. Yahoo has launched the Beta of their Yahoo Publisher Network, YPN, yesterday August 3rd.

Google has owned the publisher contextual ad space for more than two years now. There have been a number of companies who have made a run at them, for example, Quigo,

According to this MarketWatch story, the world is going blog-crazy.

Technorati.com says it's tracking almost 14 million blogs. But which of them really matter, have opinions or information that people find useful?

For the love of Pete, that's a lot of blogs.

But is anybody reading the random ramblings?

An analysis posted by Gary Price at

Google is relaunching their affiliate program, sorry, referral program, offering $20 for a referred advertiser or publisher.

The Google referral program (beta) is for businesses whose customers and visitors include small to medium-sized businesses, and who want to help those companies become more successful by running Google AdWords, or

Google has launched their Adwords API Beta Program.

The API promises to allow "developers engineer computer programs that interact directly with the AdWords server. With the applications created, advertisers and third parties can more efficiently - and creatively - manage their large AdWords accounts and campaigns."

Interesting timing of t

The Internet Marketing / Webmaster community is all aflutter about the recent Search Engine industry move to elminate comment spam. MSN, Yahoo and Google have all jumped on board by announcing their support for a standard method to allow webmasters to say, “Oh my! I have no way of controlling who posts links on my site. Please

January 12th has come and gone. I spent some time yesterday with some tapped-in industry friends and they heard nothing yesterday. I guess it's just "any day now".

Adam Viener of Goyami is a refreshingly unique combination of connected and outspoken as he demonstrates in his publication of a discussion he had with a Google rep on how the

As I wrote about last month, Google has officially modified their policy on affiliates' use of PPC advertising on Adsense.

Here's the change as described in their email:

With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse

Now you can search only Google's sponsored links. Here's a great way to see who's bidding on which keywords.

It doesn't take too many searches to see why Google's contemplating changes in policies around affiliate marketers.

For example, out of 20 sponsored links on a search for "Sean John", 8 are affiliates promoting ebay. It'll be

iProspect last week, more to come for sure...

ClickZ reports:

Search Agencies Ripe for Picking

Last week's acquisition of search engine marketing (SEM) firm iProspect by the UK-based Aegis Group may jump-start a trend of larger agencies investing in SEM. It's a reflection of search marketing's increasing power and importance, industry

As reported by a number of webmasters in various message boards, Google appears to be going through a major update (major by many people's definition). While some people are reporing no change at all, others are reporting from 50-100% loss of placement in Google.

As of the writing of this article, some are saying that the update isn't done

Well it's about time...

Microsoft Is Set to Unveil Its Internet Search Service

It says in the article that this is a "long awaited" launch. I don't know how long, but having watched the developments over a few sneak peeks at their "tech previews", this should be very interesting.

The image of a lamb stumbling into wolfville to mind as it