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Showing posts with label Webmaster Tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Webmaster Tools. Show all posts
After an interesting Hangout with AdSense Folks on 18th June at Google+, Susan Wojcicki announced about an interesting new feature called Publisher Scorecard that has been added to all AdSense accounts and the scorecard summary chart can be seen under the Home Tab. Scorecard is a tool that gives greater insights to Publishers to compare how well their Ad settings, Website load time and content is performing compared to other Publishers using AdSense as the contextual Ad network. It displays a summary of three important categories which includes Revenue Optimization, Site Health and Google+ button Integration. Each category is scored on a scale of 1-5 blue dots that indicate your performance rank or level. In today's tutorial we will learn every basic detail of this great scoring tool and will learn how to optimize our websites and blogs to increase the overall AdSense earning. Lets jump straight to this fun ride and make better money with AdSense!

What are the Scorecard Categories?

Above is a screenshot of my AdSense Account. You can clearly see the three important bolded categories which are further divided into sub categories:

1. Revenue Optimization:

By Revenue Optimization we mean improving anything that increases your overall Page CTR and RPM value and boost your earning. We received two 2/5 blue dots here and a yellow icon that indicates that this section needs improvement. It can be optimized by making three major improvements and that are:

(a) Using Recommended Ad formats

These recommended formats are often 336x280, 300x250, 728x90 or 160x600. If you are running any Ad formats other than these then please upgrade them immediately.
How to Improve it?
To improve this section use recommended ad formats that I mentioned above and you must keep your Ads above the fold. I would suggest to keep a 336X280 Text/Image Ad just below Blog Post tiles and a 728x90 big banner just below your blog header. Add a 160X600 skyscraper to your Sidebar.
Please make sure to keep your web design such that these ads may appear above the fold. The visitor must see the ads when your site loads without having to scroll down. Use the following App by Google to test if your ads are above the fold or not:
We recently developed a Plugin called AdSense Booster to add AdSense ads just above the excerpt/read more tag. This plugin was developed for blogger blogs. But you can get the same functionality even in wordpress by installing Quick AdSense Plugin.  I must tell you that our earnings increased by 40% after we installed this simple plugin which is now available to even blogger users and we are using the same plugin to  show a 468 X 60 Ad just below the opening paragraph. You can see it live in this post just below the first paragraph.

(b) Enabling both Text and Image Ads on this formats.

I would suggest that you must enable this if you haven't already done. AdSense bot knows best when to display Text or Media Ad based on the content on your site. If you are choosing just text ads or image ads then you are loosing the opportunity of an optimized Click through Rate.
How to Improve it?
Go To My Ads Tab inside your AdSense account and then click the "Edit ad Type" link below your Content Ad units. Choose the option Text & image/rich media ads as shown below:

Do this for all your AdSense for content Ad zones.

(c) Reduce Crawler Errors

This is one major section which people often underestimate and this returns in low earning. I always strongly recommend our clients to do a through validation of both their site HTML structure and robots.txt file. You must let the AdSense bot to crawl and scan your content the easiest way possible and don't block its way with Messy Fancy Scripts. 
If you check our scorecard we received a green Tick which shows an  Excellent Score. To reduce crawler errors first make sure all Jquery scripts that you use are placed within the <head> and </head> tags. Clean up your site HTML structure and remove  any script that is increasing your site speed and causing the browser to crash. 
Google has a list of crawlers for different tasks such as for detecting images, videos, smart phones or AdSense Ads. In order to make sure you allow AdSense Googlebot to crawl your site you must give it rights to do so by adding the following line in your robots.txt file: 
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
See our robots.txt file as an example.
Note: Blogger users have this added by default. Wordpress users may manually add this.


2. Site Health

Here as usual Google expects you to improve your Page speed Performance. Matt Cutts did announce on April 2010  that Page Load time would be a deciding factor for websites to rank higher on SERPs. They went so far that they even introduced PageSpeed tools last year which helps you to reduce load time of your webpages.

Yes we score too bad here as we received a red alert. Which of course is justified because I love the blog to look professional and stand apart. Here we have never listened to Google because we tried our level best to reduce the load time but Google never seemed like getting satisfied! :p I guess we would need to remove some further widgets and images to cut down the Page Load time.
How to Improve it?
Here are some quick and proper ways to reduce load time:
  • Use CSS3 features to  create backgrounds, gradients, drop shadows and don't use Images. Create elements using CSS3 as much as you can.
  • Use small image patterns for backgrounds and scroll them vertically or horizontally instead of using large and big images
  • Use CSS Sprites to reduce http requests. You will find severa
  • Place all Javascript in one place and one file
  • Place all stylesheets in one linked file
  • Remove useless Plugins and Widgets
  • Never compress CSS nor JavaScript! Even I used to recommend this before but when we talk of site maintenance you will get confused figuring out the compressed code. So please never make a mess out of your code. Keep it well indented and structured.
3. Integrate Google+ Button on your sites
Well how can Google forget promoting their Social network. So yes you must make sure to add Google+ buttons on your site to ensure you get maximum number of +1 recommendations because believe it or not social sharing votes does count a lot.
How to Improve it?
Simply add a GooglePlus button inside your posts and your sidebar. Also create a Google+ Fan Page.

 

Scorecard Symbols and Indicators

Following are some interesting details about the various symbols used in your scorecard chart. You can find more help and details on scorecard at Google Groups

1. Following are the three important Scores symbols and their description
Score   Description
excellent scorecard Excellent! No need to make any changes to this category.
improvements needed - scorecard Improvements suggested. You are advised to make some further improvements to this item.
needs improvement - scorecard Needs improvement! You must or may take quick action to optimize this item

2. Following are some symbols that would appear after you make the suggested changes.
      Symbol
 Meaning
increase in blue dots - scorecard This category’s score has increased by one or more blue dots up to four blue dots.
decrease in blue dots - scorecard This category’s score has drop down by one or more blue dots down to three blue dots.
item score improvement This item’s score has gone up from “Needs improvement” to “Improvements suggested”.
item score gone down This item’s score has gone down from “Improvements suggested” to “Needs improvement”.

Need Help?

I guess we covered every single tip and almost all best practices used to make sure you monetize your sites well and improve your CTR and RPM value. If there is anything we emphasize a lot to our clients after SEO then it's the site Design and then Monetization. Please give extra care to how appealing your site design is. You have the right to make it eye-catching by using all Fancy Jquery effects but please be assured that sometimes you need to sacrifice for the sake of a bigger gain. This is one reason why Wikipedia is so ugly yet so powerful.
It's time for some home work, we will do ours, you do yours!. Let me know for any help needed. Peace and blessings buddies. :)

AdSense Publisher Scorecard: Best Tips & Practices

After an interesting Hangout with AdSense Folks on 18th June at Google+, Susan Wojcicki announced about an interesting new feature called Publisher Scorecard that has been added to all AdSense accounts and the scorecard summary chart can be seen under the Home Tab. Scorecard is a tool that gives greater insights to Publishers to compare how well their Ad settings, Website load time and content is performing compared to other Publishers using AdSense as the contextual Ad network. It displays a summary of three important categories which includes Revenue Optimization, Site Health and Google+ button Integration. Each category is scored on a scale of 1-5 blue dots that indicate your performance rank or level. In today's tutorial we will learn every basic detail of this great scoring tool and will learn how to optimize our websites and blogs to increase the overall AdSense earning. Lets jump straight to this fun ride and make better money with AdSense!

What are the Scorecard Categories?

Above is a screenshot of my AdSense Account. You can clearly see the three important bolded categories which are further divided into sub categories:

1. Revenue Optimization:

By Revenue Optimization we mean improving anything that increases your overall Page CTR and RPM value and boost your earning. We received two 2/5 blue dots here and a yellow icon that indicates that this section needs improvement. It can be optimized by making three major improvements and that are:

(a) Using Recommended Ad formats

These recommended formats are often 336x280, 300x250, 728x90 or 160x600. If you are running any Ad formats other than these then please upgrade them immediately.
How to Improve it?
To improve this section use recommended ad formats that I mentioned above and you must keep your Ads above the fold. I would suggest to keep a 336X280 Text/Image Ad just below Blog Post tiles and a 728x90 big banner just below your blog header. Add a 160X600 skyscraper to your Sidebar.
Please make sure to keep your web design such that these ads may appear above the fold. The visitor must see the ads when your site loads without having to scroll down. Use the following App by Google to test if your ads are above the fold or not:
We recently developed a Plugin called AdSense Booster to add AdSense ads just above the excerpt/read more tag. This plugin was developed for blogger blogs. But you can get the same functionality even in wordpress by installing Quick AdSense Plugin.  I must tell you that our earnings increased by 40% after we installed this simple plugin which is now available to even blogger users and we are using the same plugin to  show a 468 X 60 Ad just below the opening paragraph. You can see it live in this post just below the first paragraph.

(b) Enabling both Text and Image Ads on this formats.

I would suggest that you must enable this if you haven't already done. AdSense bot knows best when to display Text or Media Ad based on the content on your site. If you are choosing just text ads or image ads then you are loosing the opportunity of an optimized Click through Rate.
How to Improve it?
Go To My Ads Tab inside your AdSense account and then click the "Edit ad Type" link below your Content Ad units. Choose the option Text & image/rich media ads as shown below:

Do this for all your AdSense for content Ad zones.

(c) Reduce Crawler Errors

This is one major section which people often underestimate and this returns in low earning. I always strongly recommend our clients to do a through validation of both their site HTML structure and robots.txt file. You must let the AdSense bot to crawl and scan your content the easiest way possible and don't block its way with Messy Fancy Scripts. 
If you check our scorecard we received a green Tick which shows an  Excellent Score. To reduce crawler errors first make sure all Jquery scripts that you use are placed within the <head> and </head> tags. Clean up your site HTML structure and remove  any script that is increasing your site speed and causing the browser to crash. 
Google has a list of crawlers for different tasks such as for detecting images, videos, smart phones or AdSense Ads. In order to make sure you allow AdSense Googlebot to crawl your site you must give it rights to do so by adding the following line in your robots.txt file: 
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
See our robots.txt file as an example.
Note: Blogger users have this added by default. Wordpress users may manually add this.


2. Site Health

Here as usual Google expects you to improve your Page speed Performance. Matt Cutts did announce on April 2010  that Page Load time would be a deciding factor for websites to rank higher on SERPs. They went so far that they even introduced PageSpeed tools last year which helps you to reduce load time of your webpages.

Yes we score too bad here as we received a red alert. Which of course is justified because I love the blog to look professional and stand apart. Here we have never listened to Google because we tried our level best to reduce the load time but Google never seemed like getting satisfied! :p I guess we would need to remove some further widgets and images to cut down the Page Load time.
How to Improve it?
Here are some quick and proper ways to reduce load time:
  • Use CSS3 features to  create backgrounds, gradients, drop shadows and don't use Images. Create elements using CSS3 as much as you can.
  • Use small image patterns for backgrounds and scroll them vertically or horizontally instead of using large and big images
  • Use CSS Sprites to reduce http requests. You will find severa
  • Place all Javascript in one place and one file
  • Place all stylesheets in one linked file
  • Remove useless Plugins and Widgets
  • Never compress CSS nor JavaScript! Even I used to recommend this before but when we talk of site maintenance you will get confused figuring out the compressed code. So please never make a mess out of your code. Keep it well indented and structured.
3. Integrate Google+ Button on your sites
Well how can Google forget promoting their Social network. So yes you must make sure to add Google+ buttons on your site to ensure you get maximum number of +1 recommendations because believe it or not social sharing votes does count a lot.
How to Improve it?
Simply add a GooglePlus button inside your posts and your sidebar. Also create a Google+ Fan Page.

 

Scorecard Symbols and Indicators

Following are some interesting details about the various symbols used in your scorecard chart. You can find more help and details on scorecard at Google Groups

1. Following are the three important Scores symbols and their description
Score   Description
excellent scorecard Excellent! No need to make any changes to this category.
improvements needed - scorecard Improvements suggested. You are advised to make some further improvements to this item.
needs improvement - scorecard Needs improvement! You must or may take quick action to optimize this item

2. Following are some symbols that would appear after you make the suggested changes.
      Symbol
 Meaning
increase in blue dots - scorecard This category’s score has increased by one or more blue dots up to four blue dots.
decrease in blue dots - scorecard This category’s score has drop down by one or more blue dots down to three blue dots.
item score improvement This item’s score has gone up from “Needs improvement” to “Improvements suggested”.
item score gone down This item’s score has gone down from “Improvements suggested” to “Needs improvement”.

Need Help?

I guess we covered every single tip and almost all best practices used to make sure you monetize your sites well and improve your CTR and RPM value. If there is anything we emphasize a lot to our clients after SEO then it's the site Design and then Monetization. Please give extra care to how appealing your site design is. You have the right to make it eye-catching by using all Fancy Jquery effects but please be assured that sometimes you need to sacrifice for the sake of a bigger gain. This is one reason why Wikipedia is so ugly yet so powerful.
It's time for some home work, we will do ours, you do yours!. Let me know for any help needed. Peace and blessings buddies. :)

No comments
Posted at 09:32 |  by Unknown
Recently in Feb 2013 Blogger integrated Zemanta with Blogspot blogs. Zemanta is indeed a great editorial plugin that helps you to write blog posts easily but unfortunately all such automated blogging tools does not help you to write well Optimized Blog posts that could protect you from the latest Google Penguin 2.0 Penalty! Penguin 2.0 is written especially to kill spam and unnatural links.  Zemanta blogging Plugin as you will discover later in this post could badly impact the inbound and outbound link balance of your entire blog, if you are not well versed with SEO link attributes. 
 
Following are the four important reasons why we think you should temporarily stop using zemanta to produce blog posts unless zemanta promises to improve their API:

1. Too Many external Image links

Zemanta has add-on and extensions for all major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and safari. Zemanta Plugin adds two links to the images. One inside the caption and one to the image itself. New bloggers who are not well versed with SEO pitfalls of these links often don't bother removing the caption and unlinking the image, considering it to be ethical to give credits to the rightful owner of the image. 
 
This causes a serious imbalance between your internal and external links causing a serious loss to site wide PageRank. 

2. Loss of Image Search Traffic:

You won't get traffic from Image Search because your images wont load from your server but the site you linked. In short all these images that you add through zemanta are not uploaded on your image folder, so you are simply destroying your Image Search traffic.

3. Increase in 404 Errors:

Zemanta image links could return a 404 not found crawling errors in your webmaster tools if the images are deleted by the original owner. These images are uploaded on external servers. Suppose you added an image to your blog post which is stored on Flickr. But what if that image is deleted some months later by the Flickr account holder? The image wont display and would return a 404 error to the search crawler.This would cause a serious increase in crawling errors inside your webmasters account.

4. Increase in server errors: 

zemanta suggests images mostly from its users blogs, Wikipedia or Flickr. If too many requests are sent for an image, then the website whose image is linked could possibly exceed its bandwidth limit and could go down. Most sites often don't allow external sites to directly use their Image Links and often limit the accessibility. If the user has not put such a restriction on images and you are using his image on your blog then it is acceptable but what if next month he puts the restriction? All your images would be gone - destroying both your readership and SEO reputation.

5. Misleading nofollow Option

Now here is a funny thing. If you click on Preferences Tab inside your zemanta account and look at the bottom of page under the sub-tab Look. You will see the following description for nofollow link attribute.

If you carefully see, its written rel="link_nofollow". I wonder when did this new attribute got introduced? At least I have never heard of it on any forum! I would request the Zemanta Developer to edit this line and change it to rel="nofollow" instead. This is the right way to write it.
The problem with this option is that if you activate it then it will nofollow all links on your post no matter whether they are external or internal! If you nofollow an internal link you are simply confusing the robot with content inside your very own blog and stopping the robot from crawling your internal pages. Further this option adds nofollow everywhere but not to the image links which again is surprising. 
 
If you don't activate it then it will pass your PageRank juice to all external sites that appear under the related posts sections unless you manually nofollow them.
Therefore I would advise never to use this option because it is poorly scripted. 
Isn't this option misleading for users who are not well versed with SEO and just clicks this option thinking it may nofollow external links only?

6. In-Text Links irrelevancy

The in-Text Links option gives you the ability to automatically link phrases to related sites. But most often the in-Text links suggestions consist of root domain URLs only. Zemanta mostly gives link suggestions which point to homepages only and not the relevant page except for wikipedia. So if you are talking about a Facebook Plugin, it wont gives suggestions to the plugins page but would instead point to Facebook.com
 
So if you are simply throwing external links without natural relevancy you are simply making your blog prepared for a delicious punch by Penguin Penalty!

Do you use Zemanta?

We tried to be as precise and clear as possible and mentioned all possible pitfalls of using this utility on your Blogger, Wordpress or TypePad blog. We love zemanta API ourselves and we would love it even more if these SEO points are kept in mind by the team and some serious updates are rolled out to ensure that people who use zemanta may stay safe and protected from Search Engine Algorithmic updates and may not lose precious organic traffic by blindly using the tool. They can also publish some tutorials to educate their users with the SEO guidelines and better optimized use of the tool. Amazingly they just posted about Penguin update themselves on their blog but shared no tips to their users on how to better use the plugin!
 
How long have you been using zemanta and what experiences would you like to share with us?
Stay safe and keep your SEO plug on always. Peace and blessings buddies :) 
Note: We don't share reasons without proves and have no personal offence towards any Online Business. We simply educate our readers with Search Engine requirements, policies and help them remain safe and protected. This post should be taken as a positive criticism, which if Zemanta team try to correct could change our views later.

6 SEO Reasons Why you Should Stop Using Zemanta

Recently in Feb 2013 Blogger integrated Zemanta with Blogspot blogs. Zemanta is indeed a great editorial plugin that helps you to write blog posts easily but unfortunately all such automated blogging tools does not help you to write well Optimized Blog posts that could protect you from the latest Google Penguin 2.0 Penalty! Penguin 2.0 is written especially to kill spam and unnatural links.  Zemanta blogging Plugin as you will discover later in this post could badly impact the inbound and outbound link balance of your entire blog, if you are not well versed with SEO link attributes. 
 
Following are the four important reasons why we think you should temporarily stop using zemanta to produce blog posts unless zemanta promises to improve their API:

1. Too Many external Image links

Zemanta has add-on and extensions for all major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and safari. Zemanta Plugin adds two links to the images. One inside the caption and one to the image itself. New bloggers who are not well versed with SEO pitfalls of these links often don't bother removing the caption and unlinking the image, considering it to be ethical to give credits to the rightful owner of the image. 
 
This causes a serious imbalance between your internal and external links causing a serious loss to site wide PageRank. 

2. Loss of Image Search Traffic:

You won't get traffic from Image Search because your images wont load from your server but the site you linked. In short all these images that you add through zemanta are not uploaded on your image folder, so you are simply destroying your Image Search traffic.

3. Increase in 404 Errors:

Zemanta image links could return a 404 not found crawling errors in your webmaster tools if the images are deleted by the original owner. These images are uploaded on external servers. Suppose you added an image to your blog post which is stored on Flickr. But what if that image is deleted some months later by the Flickr account holder? The image wont display and would return a 404 error to the search crawler.This would cause a serious increase in crawling errors inside your webmasters account.

4. Increase in server errors: 

zemanta suggests images mostly from its users blogs, Wikipedia or Flickr. If too many requests are sent for an image, then the website whose image is linked could possibly exceed its bandwidth limit and could go down. Most sites often don't allow external sites to directly use their Image Links and often limit the accessibility. If the user has not put such a restriction on images and you are using his image on your blog then it is acceptable but what if next month he puts the restriction? All your images would be gone - destroying both your readership and SEO reputation.

5. Misleading nofollow Option

Now here is a funny thing. If you click on Preferences Tab inside your zemanta account and look at the bottom of page under the sub-tab Look. You will see the following description for nofollow link attribute.

If you carefully see, its written rel="link_nofollow". I wonder when did this new attribute got introduced? At least I have never heard of it on any forum! I would request the Zemanta Developer to edit this line and change it to rel="nofollow" instead. This is the right way to write it.
The problem with this option is that if you activate it then it will nofollow all links on your post no matter whether they are external or internal! If you nofollow an internal link you are simply confusing the robot with content inside your very own blog and stopping the robot from crawling your internal pages. Further this option adds nofollow everywhere but not to the image links which again is surprising. 
 
If you don't activate it then it will pass your PageRank juice to all external sites that appear under the related posts sections unless you manually nofollow them.
Therefore I would advise never to use this option because it is poorly scripted. 
Isn't this option misleading for users who are not well versed with SEO and just clicks this option thinking it may nofollow external links only?

6. In-Text Links irrelevancy

The in-Text Links option gives you the ability to automatically link phrases to related sites. But most often the in-Text links suggestions consist of root domain URLs only. Zemanta mostly gives link suggestions which point to homepages only and not the relevant page except for wikipedia. So if you are talking about a Facebook Plugin, it wont gives suggestions to the plugins page but would instead point to Facebook.com
 
So if you are simply throwing external links without natural relevancy you are simply making your blog prepared for a delicious punch by Penguin Penalty!

Do you use Zemanta?

We tried to be as precise and clear as possible and mentioned all possible pitfalls of using this utility on your Blogger, Wordpress or TypePad blog. We love zemanta API ourselves and we would love it even more if these SEO points are kept in mind by the team and some serious updates are rolled out to ensure that people who use zemanta may stay safe and protected from Search Engine Algorithmic updates and may not lose precious organic traffic by blindly using the tool. They can also publish some tutorials to educate their users with the SEO guidelines and better optimized use of the tool. Amazingly they just posted about Penguin update themselves on their blog but shared no tips to their users on how to better use the plugin!
 
How long have you been using zemanta and what experiences would you like to share with us?
Stay safe and keep your SEO plug on always. Peace and blessings buddies :) 
Note: We don't share reasons without proves and have no personal offence towards any Online Business. We simply educate our readers with Search Engine requirements, policies and help them remain safe and protected. This post should be taken as a positive criticism, which if Zemanta team try to correct could change our views later.

No comments
Posted at 09:16 |  by Unknown
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