ZillionBits-Its about number$ and te<h^0!0gy

I’ve long been a member of Amazon’s affiliate program, One of the new features available via the Amazon Associates program is the Amazon aStore, which Darren Rowse already reviewed, but here’s the quick summary: an aStore is an Amazon-hosted website that displays Amazon products chosen by the associate. It can be customized to a certain degree to let the visitor also see categories of products, but it really needs more customization capabilities. All product information comes from Amazon’s databases, of course, and any purchases made through an aStore earn the affiliate a commission. The idea is to make it easy to build a featured set of products and include it on an associate’s website with no programming required. (If you’re willing to invest some time and do some programming, however, you’re better off looking at Amazon Web Services, you’ll get much more control that way.

Anyhow, I was wondering if it was possible to integrate AdSense into an Amazon aStore, so I did some experimentation and came up with The HDTV Shoppe (opens a new window).

Over-optimization happens when your website is considered “too good” by Google – either in terms of a sudden volume of backlinks, or because of heavy on-page optimization. In other words, if Google considers that your website optimization is beyond acceptable limits , your website will be red-flagged and automatically restricted or penalized.

There is a fine line between over-optimization and spamming, and it is on this line that Google can appear to err. However, this is not a mistake by the search engine – in fact, Google calculates rankings by considering thousands and thousands of different factors – and a lot of importance is attached to average “trends” within the niche / keyword range that a website is optimizing for.

The bottom line is that over-optimization is non-spamming search engine optimization that is misread by Google as being beyond acceptable limits, thus leading to a penalty in search engine rankings.

What criteria does Google use?

To understand why Google can consider certain websites over-optimized, it is important to factor in the criteria that Google uses to rank websites. Read the rest of this entry »

Google has sent Internet marketers - especially affiliates - into a uproar with their latest AdWords “summer cleaning.”

Over the past week, advertisers have literally been getting booted out of Google Adwords. That includes advertisers who spend more than 5 figures a month on AdWords. I’ve spoken with multiple super affiliates, and they are all in an uproar over what appears to be yet another “affiliate -unfriendly” move by Google.

I can’t say Google never warned us. They announced new algorithm changes in December of last year. But when advertisers started getting kicked out starting a week or so ago, it hit hard - like it came out of nowhere

An anonymous Affiliate Classroom contributor and PPC affiliates complains…

“I had an ad doing 6.7% CTR and have spent well over $150,000 on Google Adwords in the last 2 years – now they’re telling me that I need to increase my minimum bid for 300%! No way!”

So what is Google really up to? Have they gone the way of pure evil? Or is is this part of a larger and more complex agenda? Read the rest of this entry »

Considering the “big four” dynamic, procedural languages; Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby, to an extent they’re much of a muchness, offering only small variations on the same theme (ignoring PHP’s lack of support for functional-style programming). But sometimes little things make a big difference, and perhaps most of all when your code is given input to handle which it wasn’t designed for. Knocked up a simple example to compare them in this area…

You’ve got a function which takes a hash value (an associative array) and does something with it’s contents—fairly typical logic for a database-driven application, where rows are common currency. For sake of simple example, let’s say your input is a list of names, each name broken into a hash with the keys “first” and “given”. The question is how will your function cope when the hash doesn’t have quite the structure you’re expecting (like the first name is missing), given a fairly “default” use of the language—no non-standard functionality to make the language stricter…

Perl

Tackling Perl first, here’s a working example…

Read the rest of this entry »