AdSense Lets You Add Notes To Keep Track Of Account Changes

Back in October, Google announced some changes to AdSense performance reports to improve usability and make the reports more visually compelling. One of the changes involved the ability to view changes to an account in more detail with the “Show events” checkbox or a separate event report.

“Change events are automatically generated and are shown as small flags on your reporting graphs,” explains AdSense product manager Matt Goodridge. “Those annotations help you keep track of the actions you’ve taken in your account, like adding a new ad unit or blocking an additional category, and help you determine the impact of your changes.”

Based on user feedback, Google has made some further changes.

“In addition to these automatically generated events, you can now also manually add notes you want to keep track of,” says Goodridge. “This will allow you to find out whether actions which aren’t directly related to your AdSense account, like a website redesign or an advertising campaign for your site, may have had an impact on your earnings. Every user can see all the notes which have been added to an account by other users and can add, edit, and delete their own customized notes.”

Users can add personalized annotations by going to “Performance reports,” and viewing the changes as an overlay or a separate event report. From there, click “Add note” and you’re all set.

Read More

Google's First PageRank Update In 2013

Google has begun pushing out new PageRank values to the Google Toolbar yesterday. This would make the first Toolbar PageRank update of 2013.

Normally Google updates PageRank values in the Google Toolbar every 3 months or so. The previous update was in November 2012 and before that in August 2012.

Despite PageRank still being part of the algorithm, SEOs know that toolbar PageRank is often outdated and not that useful. In addition, there are many other factors part of the algorithm that may or may not be as important as PageRank.

Even though, I hope your PageRank values increased and did not decline.

Read More

The first 2013 Google Panda update is here

Well the Google Panda updates are still rolling in as Google stays determine to weed out low-quality websites from the search results, and provide users with the best content available and possible.

This Panda update will affect 1.2% of English speaking queries.

If, after today you start seeing a dramatic decrease in your website rankings and traffic, you may have been affected by this update.

If the opposite is true for you, there's a chance you've been bumped up because your competitor fell or because your website is considered higher quality than some of the other sites in the results.

Google's aim at high quality sites

In case it's a mystery to you, the reason Google and other search engines are so concerned about the quality of websites, is because the quality of a website to a user reflects back onto the search engines.

An easy example of this is if someone finds a website through Google search, then purchases a product or service on the site using their credit card and later finds out their credit card was compromised after using it on the site in question.

In the end, the person could end up being a user that resents Google for showing them search results that lead to them having your credit card scammed.

That's just one scenario, there are many other potential possibilities.

So with that in mind, give your website a once or twice-over and even get an SEO to take a look at it for you just to ensure everything is in tip top condition.

Google provided a great quality checklist in the link I added above so check that out and make sure your website is treating users like it's supposed to.

Read More