Web Log of Greg Mathews

I think most people have heard of the ‘Six degrees of separation’ theory, there have been books and films/tv shows all based on the theory yet it has never been proven one way or another.

In early July 2008, Mike of mjfdesigns.com and I where discussing the subject,I don’t remember how it came up but hey thats how most things start. Anyway we decided to see if we can test the theory out online. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the yzoo script will become available soon.

Well we have decided to sell the script as a site rather than on it’s own for the time being. The first site being onlinebestfind.com which just went live yesterday.

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I am not going to name them of give the urls but I am getting pissed off with proxy servers that Google and other big search engines insist on indexing. They are a nightmare.

Recently I discovered one such proxy server that has 1500 pages indexed in Google, about 90% of them are actually dynamic copies of Yzoo.co.uk and it’s related sites. Why is this a problem?

1. They somehow tend to get listed in the SERPs higher than the original content, bringing less visitors to the real site.

2. The search engines appear to be comparing the proxy and original site and treating the original as having duplicate content and then removing it from the SERPs.

3. The proxy servers tend to remove all javascript code etc from the page, basically disabling ads being displayed such as adsense and then they place their own ads on the page, stealling ad revenue from the original site.

How can this problem be resolved, well first and most importantly the big Search engines should not even index these proxy servers, it would not be hard for them to do as there are give away signs in the urls of these sites.

As a webmaster you can redirect proxy server users to a ‘forbidden’ error message or a specific page informing them the site is not available via that proxy, but that takes time, you need to find the IP addresses of the Proxy servers and these can be changed easily by the proxy owners so you need to be ontop of it.

Something needs to be done about these thieving proxy servers and fast, it is getting stupid. I know there are reasons that people use them and I don’t like refusing them access to my sites but if the proxies they use insist on stealling from me then it is their problem rather than min

In the end I sent a screenshot of my Google analytics showing my traffic sources to Adbrite and I got a response from them a day or so later saying that they have reinstated my account.

I have to ask why this happened? is it just because the site is a high traffic site? surely its not the busiest site signed up to Adbrite?

Will I place adbrite back on the site? I really don’t know. Earnings are far lower than Bidvertiser so I may just stick with them and direct advertising.

Yesterday Adbrite asked me for the log files of the site to verify if the click fraud, I asked them which log files they required as the server only stores the past 4 days logs and each days log file is about 80mb in size when compressed.

They replied asking me to send screen shots of logs prior to 29th April. Are they real? the site log files are about 80mb per day when compressed, they want me to uncompress them and do a screen shot of each page full of logs? Read the rest of this entry »

I received an email from adbrite yesterday informing me that click fraud has been identified on our site and as such the site can has been disabled.

I am sure this is the same problem as with Bidvertiser a  few days ago but when replying to the Adbrite email address ( support@adbrite.com) it bounced, I tried from numerous email accounts and they all had the same problem. In the end I had to use the online form in the hope that they will be able to resolve the issue just as bidvertiser have.

OK its been over a week now since we implemented Bidvertiser and adsdaq, and adbrite since, and out of the three Adsdaq is performing the worse, in fact we’re lucky if it hits $1/day so we are dropping the Adsdaq network advertising from the site.

We have also moved away from OpenX to serve our direct advertising because of the lack of ’self registration’ for advertisers which was, in our opinion a major flaw. Instead we are using ‘AdManager Pro’ from phpwebscripts.com, it’s not a free but it does have the ’self registration’ feature which is needed. Read the rest of this entry »

As a followup to my post a few days ago Google doing click fraud themselves I looked into it a bit more and it appears the IP addresses in question may be from  Google services such as Google Translate etc so I contacted Bidvertiser as many of the site users use the translate service provided by Google so I do not want these users banned from seeing the bidvertiser ads.

I was pleasentley surprised when I got a response from Bidvertiser within 24 hours confirming that they would lift the ban on the Google IP addresses within the next 24 hours.  This is far better support/service then you would ever get from Google.  Well done Bidvertiser.

We have decided to offer advertising direct to advertisers after the recent decision by Google.

The ads are not context so any ad will appear on any page but ads can be geotargetted enabling advertisers to target ads towards specific regions if necessary.

Take a look at http://adserver.yzoo.co.uk and if you place an ad before the 7th May 2008, drop us a line  mentioning this post and we will double your impressions.

OK so we removed adsense from Yzoo as requested by Google and bidvertiser ads are being displayed.

When I logged into my Bidvertiser account today I was presented with the following message:

We have recently detected invalid clicks generated on your BidVertiser ads. The invalid clicks were generated from the following IP(s):
218.111.59.157 , 66.249.85.69 , 74.125.16.39 , 72.14.193.4 , 72.14.195.225 , 66.249.84.14

The listed IP(s) are now blocked in our system, however, we ask that you take any necessary actions to avoid generating any further invalid clicks this way.

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