So, I went to adsense to check my stats and I get a page that is almost blank with the only text showing being UsernamePasswdNotMatch

Ahhhhh…. what have I done to upset the Google overlords…..

It sounds like just clearing your browser cache and trying again should get you in. It’s also possible that this is an intermittent problem and is affecting more than just your account. The Digital Point Forums can be a good place to check up and see if others are having similar login problems.

Is it just me or does it seem like about half of google sign in pages are out of order. (GMail seems ok) Adwords, Analytics, and Adsense all refuse to bring up the login box. (Main page for adwords and analytics loads, but the iframe that houses the login doesn’t.) It’s about 11:20AM EST now and this has been the case for the last hour or two. I haven’t seen any mention yet on official google blogs. (Calendar seems unresponsive for me right now too.)

Ok – I think it may have been just me, maybe leaving firefox open for 5 days at a time with 29 tabs causes funky things like that to happen. *(Tested on the same machine with another browser and the login came up, si I killed and restarted firefox and all is well.)

This is a fairly significant “state of this site” type post and well… if you’re a usual visitor you might want to read/skim this one. It’s been about 15 months or so since the last big redesign of this site and as some long time lurkers may know, the updates were FEW and far between before moving to WordPress and this new layout. I mean, a year or so between updates was not uncommon. In the last year+ I’ve had a few spans where a month or so has gone by without posting, but in many cases I’ve been posting multiple (in other cases MANY MANY) posts in a single day.

When I started including adsense in the site, frankly I was thinking that it might be able to cover my hosting fees and initially it looked on target to do that and I put more time into typing here and saw revenues from advertising go up and frankly December and January of last year were phenomenal. At those levels, a single months income from advertising revenue would pay for all of my sites for a year. But the disappointments had started to happen the beginning of December with the delisting of the northcarolinagenealogy site and going from ~100 visits a day to about 10-20 a day. I’m not certain still on the cause, but I had done an “auto-refresh” redirect to get people from the old averyjparker.com/ncgen directory to the new northcarolinagenealogy.net domain… that apparently is a no-no and I changed it, I set up 301 redirects that sort of worked. I think at one point in my haste I had a typo that sent a redirect to a spammy domain and that was fixed as soon as I found it, but the northcarolinagenealogy.net site has not been indexed by google for 11 months now.

The site has grown some and is now getting 20-30 visits a day, but still nowhere near what it was last November. “But wait, you were talking about THIS site weren’t you?” yes… let me get back to this site. I was seeing great traffic in January, every post was indexed by google in full within a week and frankly being able to search from a clients site for an issue I knew I dealt with a month ago but didn’t remember the details and pull up my page from a quick “google” was VERY nice. But, things changed dramatically in February. I guess it was the “Big daddy” update. That’s what I’ve blamed it on, but I don’t think there is a SINGLE article that I’ve written SINCE February that has been fully indexed and what’s more there are some pre-February 2006 articles that disappeared. Back in January, I could go to goole and do a site:averyjparker.com inurl:2005/12 search and see all articles posted in December of 05… well you might say, you still can.

Yes, but today that search turns up 20 articles, there were probably a total of 250-300 ORIGINAL articles published on this site in December. So, Google is only indexing now, ~10% of my site. Which is about where the traffic is compared to pre-Big Daddy too. And probably about where the adsense revenue is. The long and short of it is that right now, I’m lucky to make 20-30 a month in adsense revenue at the current traffic level and I do enjoy posting here, but frankly I have poured in WAY TOO much time for what I’m getting back. Yes, to be brutally honest the money matters. NO, it’s not that I’m greedy, but let me put it this way. Would you be willing to spend hours a week on a website for $30 a month? or would you be willing to spend hours a week on a website for $400 a month? Duh!!!

Time is the one thing that ALL of us have in scarcity…. it’s the currency of our lives. The return on investment (ROI) that I’ve been getting for the time in this site just can’t justify me continuing the pace of posting that I’ve had.

I’ve spent several times trying to figure out why the indexing has changed for this site (and disappeard for the northcarolinagenealogy.net site) and I’ve done what I can to fix what issues people have suggested or things that I’ve noticed that I suspected may be the problem. I started the www.computerrepairasheville.com site so that I could have a place JUST to advertise my computer service’s in the local area and hopefully pick up some local business that way. At this point, I will likely need to be using Adsense to get some paid visits to that site (since google hasn’t done a full index of THAT site yet either.)

It frustrates me in many ways because it seems quite arbitrary. I know of several other sites (that I’ve either worked on, or run) that are fully indexed to within the week JUST LIKE THIS ONE USED TO BE in googles index. (southcarolinagenealogy.org, onlineradiotv.com for instance.) They have much less content though and maybe that’s the thing, maybe the pace of change here is too quick for google to keep up with. It never seemed to be a problem with MSN or Yahoo’s search results and indexing though. So, in a sense I’m throwing in the towel…. that’s not the way I want to see it though…. “temporarily pausing high maintenance of the site”.

So, what does this mean?

This site will stay up indefinitely at this point and I will post to it from time to time. I will likely not do it with any regularity, or predictability. I will likely cover many things in a single post if I find them interesting enough to bother. I will try to continue to use this as my own knowledge base to have a single reference for many of the issues I’ve run across as I do computer service.

I will not be doing much coverage on any and every tech story that crosses the news. I MIGHT spend some time on some more interesting items if I have time and am motivated to do some deeper analysis. I REALLY enjoyed the WMF exploit investigation last December.

Will this change? It might. If things change, such that I’m getting enough traffic to justify investing some time here, I might get back to a heavier posting schedule. That means if 1) either Googles indexing straightens out and the site’s fully indexed or 2) a majority of web searchers start using another search engine. I’m not holding my breath on either. It’s been 11 months of banishment for one site and almost 9 months of quasi-banishment for another site…at this point I’m content to let it lay dormant a while and see if THAT helps.

Today, I forked off a few other domains to individual pages to try to make sure I don’t have any “duplicate content” penalties. But… I must say depending on the threshhold for what Google sees as duplicate content, the very concept of “blog categories” could be penalizing me. I have come to a point though where I’ve done all I can, don’t really care to much to try to make it work as a supplement ot my income and must spend times on things that give a better ROI.

Thanks Google for making a few really nice things possible over the last year. I hope we can do it again sometime. I have a lot of site ideas of things that I want to do and I may get the time to work on them, yes they would likely include content that was hopefully advertising supported, but my optimism on advertising supported is much less now given the great reliance there is on stable indexing.

Is this sour grapes?

Maybe, but I’m thoroughly frustrated when I know there are 300 articles from December and Google only indexes 20. I want content on my site to AT LEAST BE FINDABLE BY ME…. that’s why I’ve put it here in the first place. I’ve had to use MSN to accomplish that lately and I don’t know why my site seems to have a penalty, but it does and maybe someday that penalty will be lifted by Google, or maybe sometime Google will be less relevant. Until then, I don’t see it making sense to spend so much time on this site.

I may add to this post more if there is more to add/update. Another thing you may notice that I’ve started doing more of is updating individual posts instead of writing a new post and then backlinking to an old item that it updates. So on some issues you might find it useful to visit an old article, as I MAY have just updated it instead of posting new.

All in all, I hope that this site has been of use to you, I have given it far more time than it likely ought to have received but I hope you’ll continue to find useful things here. I guess you might say I’m “googlebummed”.

There is a new twist on the bot networks that have been the plague of computing in recent years. This one is called ClickBot. The story is from Incidents.org Many sites, (like this one) use adsense to “monetize their content”. The idea is that advertisers bid on “clicks”. So, if I wanted to advertise on the keywords “asheville computer repair” I might bid 5 cents for every click on one of my ads. The problem is many content owners are less than scrupulous.

Many, think… ok if I’m paid per click – I could click on my own ads, or encourage others to click on them (or tell others…) That’s against the terms of use and it should be easy to catch. Hm…. you always get clicks from IP address…….. which happens to be where you log into your adsense control panel from hm….. But, the bot writers are getting clever and this clickbot essentially uses zombie pcs to “click” on the ads, giving the bot network owner money and ripping out off of the advertisors. Yet another way to try and swindle people out of a lot of money by doing it a little at a time….

(Wasn’t that some plot line in one of the Superman movies from the 80′s – with Richard Pryor as a computer programmer, getting maybe the fraction of a cent interest from all the banks accounts transfered to his each month….) Anyway – random thought through the brain.

Here’s sans summary of the bot….

With pay per click programs such as Google Adsense, there is another way to earn money from advertisers by building a scam where the money flows like this:

The advertisers pay Google for clicks in the hope to sell something.

Google has a bunch of publishers that own a website and run banners for them. Google pays (a high percentage) of the revenue to the publisher.

Some of these publishers aren’t honest, but Google (tries to) detects fraudulous clicks and suspends them, so they need to hide the additional clicks better.

Somebody with a botnet generates the clicks from a few hundred machines and makes sure they look as innocent as possible. Keeps it a low profile while at it. Of course the botnet owner will want a share from the publisher.

Bottom line is that the advertiser pays in exchange for a bot visiting him.

It seems some bot operator left a website with both the bot’s *.exe and the web based control panels wide open. An anonymous source sent us the URL.

While some of the *.exe’s were detected pretty well, this one stood out [Virustotal results]:
AntiVir 6.34.1.27/20060514 found [TR/Drop.Small.ann.1]
Avast 4.6.695.0/20060512 found nothing
AVG 386/20060512 found nothing
BitDefender 7.2/20060514 found nothing
CAT-QuickHeal 8.00/20060512 found [(Suspicious) - DNAScan]
ClamAV devel-20060426/20060512 found nothing
DrWeb 4.33/20060514 found [Adware.IEHelper]
eTrust-InoculateIT 23.72.7/20060512 found nothing
eTrust-Vet 12.4.2207/20060512 found nothing
Ewido 3.5/20060513 found [Hijacker.BHO.d]
Fortinet 2.76.0.0/20060514 found [suspicious]
F-Prot 3.16c/20060512 found nothing
Ikarus 0.2.65.0/20060512 found nothing
Kaspersky 4.0.2.24/20060514 found [Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Small.ann]
McAfee 4761/20060512 found nothing
Microsoft 1.1372/20060513 found nothing
NOD32v2 1.1536/20060513 found nothing
Norman 5.90.17/20060512 found nothing
Panda 9.0.0.4/20060513 found [Suspicious file]
Sophos 4.05.0/20060513 found nothing
Symantec 8.0/20060514 found nothing
TheHacker 5.9.7.142/20060512 found nothing
UNA 1.83/20060512 found nothing
VBA32 3.11.0/20060513 found nothing
It is interesting to note that the botnet was 115 bots in size at the early time of the day I was looking at it and most were under 15 clicks each.

It’s been reported to Google in order to make sure nobody gets paid.

There are a couple news stories about a McAfee SiteAdvisor report about the search engines responsibility for sites that distribute malware.

McAfee said Friday that the epidemic of spyware and viruses could be linked to search engines. According to research from the company, even seemingly benign search terms could bring up sites loaded with nasty payloads.

The study looked at the five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask — and covered a period from January through April. Researchers found that in every search engine, popular keywords returned sites that could be potentially dangerous.

What’s worse, in popular keywords such as “free screensavers,” “digital music,” “popular software,” and “singers,” as much as 72 percent of the returned results contained some kind of risky link.

This really isn’t a big surprise to me. I’ve known people to pick up pests just browsing for lyrics. What is a bit more disturbing is the SPONSORED LINKS were 2-4 times more likely to be sites with malware….

Even worse, sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results, according to the survey, which combined data from SiteAdvisor’s automated Web crawlers and new searches using popular keywords culled from the Google Zeitgeist and other industry sources.

I know several times I’ve gone through and filtered NUMEROUS domains from the google adsense ads on this site. My concern is that there are so many that MANUAL filtering is not working. It would be nice if google could sniff the content of a target page and cross reference against known malware definitions for attempts to auto-download. Then ban the site if a match is found.

I don’t know if I would hold the search engines responsible for the organic results. There is NO way, they can re-crawl the web fast enough to keep up with the shifting sands of the web as it is, much less adding the burden of screening for sites that have malware (and what if the site adds it after they’ve been indexed…?) But, the sponsored links, if ANYTHING should be LESS likely to have such pests. That SHOULD be one of the safer havens. That is IF they are to succeed in having people feel comfortable clicking on the links.

The most dangerous keywords include “free screensavers,” “bearshare,” “kazaa,” “download music” and “free games.”

This is definitely something that they (MSN/YAHOO/GOOGLE/et al) need to seriously work on. In all fairness, MSN had the safest results, perhaps due to their Strider HoneyMonkey Detection More details at the articles above.

I’ve run across a couple of interesting things. The first was linked to from the second one I’ll mention. I know, some time back, I visited a publicly available Google Adsense tool a few months back and at that time found an interesting tool that gave you keyword suggestions based on a term or keyword that you supplied. Interesting and very likely it gave results that you might not have thought of without the tool. However, I don’t recall being able to get quite as much information as it appears they give now…

So, in addition to the Traffic estimator that I saw mention of yesterday, the Adwords keyword tool gives a good deal of interesting information. Suggesting other variations on keywords, showing search volume, versus competitive ad volume. What I find even more interesting is that there’s a “site-related keywords” tab which you can use to analyze a page or a page+links from the page for what Google sees as the important keywords.

Many times, I’ve wondered how Google sees a page. Which keywords jump out at google as being relevant and while I suspect this may not be IDENTICAL to the way the main google crawler sees the page (it would take incoming links into account as well as who know what else?)… Anyway, short of counting which words appear the most on the page and doing more of a basic word count analysis. I didn’t know of a good way previously to see how Google sees a page.

Like I say, I’ve been interested in trying out Adwords, specifically targetting a specific area and getting a bit more information (a better peak behind the curtain…) I think is making me more likely to give it a test run.

The other link is a Keyword research tool from SEO Book… It uses the Overture keyword suggestion tool as it’s backend, gives links to various advertising networks, estimated search volume at the big three google, msn, yahoo and links to overture price estimates. It looks like a great “all in one” tool for anyone interested in seeing what keywords are more competitive, have more volume and basic ballpark price estimate. Very interesting for anyone considering using pay per click ads.

For a long time, the only way to play around with Google advertising possibilities was to join Adwords and then you could choose different keywords, see search volume information, estimate the ad position, clicks per day, etc…. I’ve been tempted many times to look into Adwords (which is the flip side of AdSense…) Many times. In fact, I still may, but today the Inside Adwords blog has announced the standalone traffic estimator that can be used without logging into your adwords account.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s interesting. I do find a few limitations in a lack of estimates for locally targetted keywords (which is more what I see as being more interesting to me at this point in time.) The standalone traffic estimator is at this link.

It does look promising and, as I said, I would be most interested in local targeting right now. After a bit of experimentation this tool may give me MORE incentive to go ahead and join up with Adwords to give it a good test. I guess from the buying side of advertising I’ve never had great experience. I remember paying $120 for ads that netted me 1 customer and a job which was a bit more trouble than it was worth, word of mouth has been far much better to me (and easier on the wallet of course…) But, I think doing google adwords has potential. Maybe not marketing to EVERYBODY on earth, but specifying a certain market, city, etc.

New category for Google Adsense – I talk about it enough here…. anyway. I’ve noticed today that they’ve expanded the referrals program. When it started, the deal was $1 for Mozilla Firefox (with Google toolbar) referrals and then the Google Adsense referral for which you earned $100 (If I recall correctly), when the signup earned their first $100. Then they rolled out AdWORDS referrals which was $20 when the referral spends their first $100….. Well, now they’ve gone and added a few more options….

There are now Google Pack *($2 per referral) and Picasa referrals ($1) per referral available….

(Referrals are new Windows users for the software (that have not previously downloaded Picasa or Google Pack).

The links range from a simple text link like this

Up to banner size links and the small rectangular graphics like this

It looks like there have been quite a few variations on the referral link designs for ALL the referral links, so you’ve got some variety to pick and choose to fit in to your site (or to contrast…)

Text links are currently for US users only.

It’s interesting to see that the page in adsense where you can choose referrals says….

Google AdSense program policies allow you to place one referral per product, for a total of up to four referrals, on any page.

However – there are five items that can be referred (firefox, adsense, adwords, google pack and picasa)… The terms that are linked only specify one referral link per product, so I think they may have a typo, it will be interesting to see if they limit the referral links per page….

Here’s the relevant segment of the policies text that was linked to from the above quote….

A single referral button per product may be placed on a page, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above. Referral buttons are considered to be ‘Google ads’ for purposes of these program policies.