#if debug

WordPress has a feature in it which shows activity surrounding your particular blog, named “Incoming Links”. For a long time, WordPress has been using the services of blog search engine and aggregator Technorati to deliver this feature. Using Technorati was an excellent decision for quite some time, especially when blogging was still relatively new and Technorati where blazing their own trail in that space. It made even more sense when Automattic released Pingomatic, as virtually all blogging platforms sent activity notifications to that and Technorati subscribed to that stream of data.

Things started to change and the usefulness of Technorati started to fade as the big guns entered into the blog search space, namingly Google. Google Blog Search was a great service on its own, using the incredible infrastructure behind Google to keep their blog search index fresh. Not being content with great, Google set out to make their Google Blog Search index exceptionally fresh as they started accepting ping notifications. Of course, as soon as that happened - Pingomatic started sending notifications into Google, which has yielded an index which is minty fresh - usually showing only minutes of delay.

With the recent release of WordPress 2.3, the WordPress team have now switched from Technorati to Google Blog Search for their “Incoming Links” feature. This single link change could have a fairly profound impact on Technorati, as with literally hundreds of thousands of blogs running WordPress - they were getting traffic for free. The lack of the link from WordPress, coupled with the superior fire power of Google and tongues have to be wagging about the future of blog search engine Technorati.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been running some simple tests surrounding Google Adsense colour palette performance. The results of that test reinforce what others have previously said about Google Adsense, which in short says that blended or complementary colours out perform other colour choices.

While perusing through the historical Adsense click stream data - something popped out at me. It seems that the average cost per 1000 clicks or eCPM is strongly in favour of the highest click through rate Adsense theme used on the site.

For the sake of illustration, the table below contains the Google Adsense results from October 2007. I have normalised the results to conceal my enormous profits for easy comparison:

The above table shows that the two different Adsense colour schemes were displayed approximately the same number of times over the month. As pointed out in the Adsense theme performance article, the fully blended Open Air theme has the highest click through rate. To clear up any ambiguity, the two themes are being displayed in the same location on each page throughout the site.

All things being created equal, I would have expected that the eCPM of the Open Air theme to be approximately 1.8 times that of Graphite, based on the click through rate. When I first noticed this happening, I thought it must have been a random event; however when it continued to happen every single month it became clear it was by design.

Thinking about what is happening though makes a lot of sense for Google, as it maximises their profits. When a request comes into Google Adwords, the system looks at what site and web page it is being delivered to so it can attempt to return relevant advertising. At this point, it seems reasonable that they are also checking what ad format and theme settings are in use for this particular request and are returning the ads with the highest maximum cost per click based on statistics.

Are Google using the lower click through rate advertising combinations to deliver lower cost advertising because they have an obligation from their advertisers to show their ads? I think they are doing just that and that they favour delivering higher cost per click ads to higher click through rate streams as it maximises their profits.

Does anyone have any other thoughts on the matter? I’m more than happy to be proved completely wrong if it’ll help increase my understanding of how Google Adwords and Adsense work.

Over the last few months, I have been experimenting with Google Adsense and using the channels feature to measure the impact said changes.

There are volumes of information on tuning Google Adsense for higher performance on the internet, so I thought I might as well put some of their recommendations to the test for myself. As a small experiment, I have been been randomly selecting the colour of the Google Adsense ads on each impression for the last six months.

The Adsense control panel shows that over any given period of time, each colour or channel has been represented equally to the user. Throughout the rather lengthy experiment, I have gone through four different standard colour themes, which included:

• Open Air
• Graphite
• Seaside
• Shadow

The Google Adsense tuning guides suggest that blending the advertising into the site or using complementary colours yields the best outcome. For my personal site, which has always had a largely white based theme - I can confirm that a full blend has been the highest performer. The list of Adsense themes above is in ranked order based on the click through rates that they have generated. Surprising, at least to me, is that Open Air has not only beaten the competition each month, but at times by as much as 250%!

In the coming month, I’ll be looking to perform some testing on the size and placement of the Google Adsense ad blocks through the site. As soon as I have enough data to make a reasonably informed decision about the results, I’ll post them here for everyone else to see.

After launching ifdebug on the 3rd November, it’s only taken Googlebot and Yahoo! Slurp an amazing four days to crawl and index the site. Many moons ago, people would report having their sites online for literally months before being crawled by search engines, let alone have the content showing up in their index.

In August, Matt Cutts pointed out that the Google index is becoming minty fresh. What used to take months back in the year 2000, is now happening in days and what was taking days in 2005 is now regularly happening in hours or minutes. While the majority of the world don’t care about this sort of stuff and it never even enters into their consciousness, I find this nothing short of a technical marvel.

All major search engines currently report that they index literally billions of objects reaching into the farthest corners of the internet. This is where the amazing aspect comes into effect, ifdebug is but one of hundreds of millions online and some how the major search engines manage to find the time to crawl and index it only a matter of days after it was created!

The fast crawl rate is surely due to the link from my personal blog pointing here, as it is already well indexed and receives constant attention from the major search engines on a daily basis. As for managing the on going freshness of the site, sitemaps and online services such as pingomatic must play a reasonably substantial role in helping to keep their indexes fresh.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the major search engines over the coming weeks and months to see how they are performing; I’ll report back with the finding if there are any worth mentioning.