For several times, Google Adsense team helped me earn more from the Adsense ads displayed on my blog by giving me advices. During the times when I only used 2 Adsense unit, they told me to add 1 more unit because according to them, I can use up to 3 Adsense units in a page. In an another message, they told me to place the Adsense unit on the hot spot of a page like, above the fold, because those spots are tested as easily be noticed by the visitors.

I followed what they advised me which I am also happy because my Adsense income has increased.

More Ads Above the Fold be Penalized

But with the release of the new update of Google on its search engine algo, my implementation of Google Adsense will just lead my blog to the decrease of its income than getting more from Google Adsense because what will you earn from the ads if no one will visit your blog because it is already penalized by Google on its search engine?

Google called its new update, the Page Layout Algorithm.

Google is now looking at the layout of the page of every site, and it calculates the amount of content that a visitor will see once he landed on that page.

Of course, Google Team who are responsible on its search engine admitted that ads above the fold perform well. They said, “we understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content.” However, they are also considering the feeling of the visitors from the search engine who visited a page with lots of ads above the fold. Thus Google said, “rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.” That’s the reason why they implemented this new Page Layout Algorithm.

You can check your site or every page of your site by the browser size tool of Google and learn how many percent of the above-the-fold spot have been situated by the ads. If you think that almost all the space is eaten by just the ads, then I think you need to change the ad placement to avoid the search engine penalty.

Now, what about if you changed immediately the layout of your site? Will you still be affected by it? Google answers:

If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

Checking My Own Site

So, now I will check all my sites and change the layout immediately to avoid another problem that this update might bring to me. I suffered a lot from its Panda update and I don’t want to suffer again from this new update.

Source: Google Official Blog.

Google is constantly changing its own search algorithm just to make their users content of the search results.

Few months ago, many publishers, blog owners and webmasters are shouting for help what to do because their blogs and websites are affected by the Panda Updates implemented by Google in its search algo. There are websites who always topped the SERP but later, they are nowhere to find.

Just recently, another update was launched by Google and it was called as “Search Plus for World”.

What is Google’s “Search Plus for World”?

Google’s Search Plus for World is the latest ability of the Google Search Engine in understanding not just the content but also the relationship of the search engine users to other users.

After transforming the search engine into a social search, Google now has added three more features to make it what is now the “Search Plus for World”. You can immediately notice these features when searching the web using Google Search Engine. These features are:

1. Personal Results. When search the web using Google Search Engine, the result will include photos and posts from Google+ (or, I think, from other Google owned services like Picasa and others,) whether you own them or are just shared by your friends in Google+ to you.
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results.  While you are typing the search keywords, Google will immediately give you result through its automatic search suggestions and results of people that you might be interested in following.
3. People and Pages. The result pages will also contain people profiles and Google+ pages which are related to the search you made.

However, these new features will only work if you have logged-in to Google accounts. In other words, the result you will see in your end is not the same to what others see at their ends. What you will be seeing in the result that Google showed when search for something is based on the data Google got about you, as explained in Google’s official blogpost.

Federal Regulators, Investigating

The Washingtonpost in its January 13, 2011 report revealed that the Federal regulators are investigating the recent Google updates whether the change is unfair to its competitors by featuring its own other services in search results.

The Federal Trade Commission, expanding an existing antitrust probe, now will look at Google’s decision to incorporate data from its social network, Google+, into search results, said the person who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the probe is private.

Personal Experience

I tried just today searching the web using the Google Search Engine while I am still logged-in to Google accounts, but then there’s nothing new in the result. I don’t know if this new Google update has been rolled out already to all users around the world. But if this has been already implemented to all users, then I think the problem is on my Google+ account. Maybe Google has the problem understanding me, since I am not that active in Google+.

Actually, until now, I am still glued to Facebook. There were times that I opened my Google+ account just because Google sent me a notification telling me to add some people to my network.

I recently received a message from Google when I logged in to my Adsense account. Google told me that the most visited webpage of this blog, Make Money Online by Blogging, has been detected by its system for being too slow. The Google system advised me then to speed it up or the whole site by doing the following:

1. Spriting the images.
2. Setting the expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources.

But, instead of following the recommendation of Google to sprite those images, I opted to change the bullet design used by the bulleted items at the sidebar from using the small bullet images to nothing. So, I guess, this speed up the site or the webpage a little bit since the browser will never request those bullet images anymore.

Now, for the second recommendation of Google, I did follow it by inserting the code below into the .htaccess file.

I found this code by searching the internet. I only changed the specified options.

Whether this code works, that is what I don’t know yet. I will still check it using any tools available in the internet.

… not yet done…

I checked again the advised webpage and I found out that I activated the display of gravatar in the comment section. Of course these images add up more downloading time and HTTP requests, so I better diactivated it.

And by the way, you can check the speed of your webpages by using the Page Speed tool by Google Labs. It also gives recommendations on what you should do to speed up your blog or webpages in particular.

When I learned that Google+ (Plus) is launched by Google, I immediately tried to sign up an account. But it was denied by Google saying that the signing up of a Google+ account is currently in invite basis.

I haven’t ask others who got already an account from Google’s social networking site but I am waiting for someone who will give me one invite.  A certain friend read my blogpost about it and send me a Google+ invite (invitation) but it was sent to my Yahoo email account which is not accessible already because of my failure to sign-in to that email account for more than 3 months.

Finally today, it was Google itself that send me the invitation via my GMail account. I created an account and I am currently wondering what the site can do to me.

If you want, you can connect to me. Just search my name “Sustines Laplana“.

By the way, the Google+ invite only mode is over and it is already open to all.

I learned from the Jalopnik that the self-driving car of Google hit a prius near the Google’s headquarters in Mountain View – California. It’s the first reported accident of these cars. However, Google’s official statement claimed that the robot should not be blamed from this accident because the car was on a manual mode.

So, the question of the Jalopnik on who should be apprehended on this accident has been answered already. It should be the driver of the car.

But what if the car while on auto-driving will be involve in similar accident, whose name should the police be written down on the ticket? Well, obviously, it’s Google’s. I don’t know if there’s a law requiring a human to be in the car while the car (robot-driven or not) is running on the road. But I am sure that the owner of the car is responsible for the mess it has caused.

Jalopnik’s thought about self-driving cars might be in negative but I think, self-driving cars can be good to everyone especially if its system will be made perfect.

I was actually imagining the car featured in movies where the user would just tell the car the destination and the car would just drive the passenger into the destination being told.

You can read the Jalopnik’s report here.

On Thursday, Google Adsense Team announced the availability of the mobile interface of Google Adsense beta version just like what has been shown on the image below. For more details, kindly visit the blogpost posted at the Google Adsense blog.

I will not be discussing here on how to access Google Adsense interface through smartphones because I am not interested in talking about here. I am not actually excited on what I saw from the mobile interface because it’s just like similar to the pc version. Besides, I already expected that time will come Google Adsense Team will optimize its interface for the mobile phones especially for iPhone and similar smartphones because a lot of Adsense Publishers are already shifting from PC web browsing to smartphone web browsing.

What really makes me excite upon seeing the image above is the amount of the income for the day, worst for the whole month so far. It says:

• $1,484.68 Today so far
• $16,192.27 Yesterday
• $118,708.50 This month so far

The income is so … I don’t know how to describe what I feel upon seeing that amount. One thing I know is that I want to earn more than that in a day or a month.

But of course, I know that it might just sample of Adsense income that they can use to test for the mobile interface. But it might be a real Adsense earning too. I already heard of a Pinoy who earns $10,000 a month in average from Adsense alone.

And getting income as high as that is not really impossible. We just need to flood our profitable blog with hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, and then … you know.

Just like what I said already, it’s actually my dream and my goal having an income more than that a month. As of now, I was thousand miles away from that amount but I believe I can still get there in no time. I just need to make my steps more precise so as to avoid any mistakes that might lead to my failure.

I admit that since December 2010, most of my blogs are affected by the Google’s changes of algorithm which have been rolled-out several times since August 2010. And few weeks from now, Google will again apply new algo to the rest of the world that took effect already in the US searches last week.

If those big guys are affected by this new change, then I believe that small guys will be affected too. So, I have lots of things to adjust and realign for my blogs to survive.

You might noticed few changes on the design of the blog. The theme used by the blog is the same but I just made few adjustment especially on the width of the content section. I also changed the placement and width of the Adsense ads displayed.

This is actually my response to the message sent to me just recently by the Google Adsense Team who personally reviewed my blog. They said that I am missing out on Adsense revenue but I still have a “great opportunity to increase” my “AdSense earnings.” They recommend that I change the current implementation of the Adsense ads.

For now, I am still observing what will happen to my Adsense income after these few changes. In few days, I will again implement some changes and then observe what will be the result. Whichever of the implementations resulted to higher increase of my Adsense income, then that will be my final implementation of the Google Adsense on this blog.

Actually, the message that I received recently was the second one they sent to me. The first one was sent to me last November 2010. And as a response to their recommendations, I made some changes on the implementation of the Adsense. And yes, the result was great. The CPM of my Adsense ads has increased by 300 percent.

However, it seems that my Adsense recent CPM is not yet good and I am still missing something even if it is already 300 percent higher compared to its previous CPM. And I am very much thankful to the Google Adsense Team who reviewed my blog for their advices. I just hope that the new changes I made will result to another another increase in CPM.

I wonder, if I can manage to increase the current CPM by 1,000 percent.

Just imagine if the Adsense displayed on this blog will generate 1,000 (just an example) impressions and if the CPM is $1.00, then the revenue will be $1.00 for that 1,000 impressions. Now what if it will increase by 1,000 percent. So the CPM will become $11 and the income will be $11 for that same impressions.

But I don’t think that a $11 is already good. I know some Adsense publishers whose Adsense are having a CPM of more than that.

When I logged in today to my GMail account, I immediately noticed the message as shown on the screenshot below saying, “Click here to enable desktop notifications for Gmail.”

This Gmail desktop notification is a new feature rolled out by Google that let the Gmail users know when there is new email or chat message. A pop-up will show everytime you have new email or chat message. However, it is only available to Google Chrome users and it should be enabled in the settings.

How to enable or disable the Gmail desktop notification feature of Gmail?

Just follow the instruction below in enabling the funtionality:

1. Click the Settings link in the upper-right corner of Gmail.
2. On the General tab, select the option you’d like in the Desktop Notifications section. You’ll be able to turn Chat notifications on or off, and can also choose to turn email notifications off, receive notifications for all incoming email, or only those Gmail marks ‘important’.
3. Click Save.

But if you saw the message as shown on the screenshot above, if you’ll click the “Click here to enable” the notification for chat is the one being enabled. So, you still need to visit the setting page and click the radio button for the enable new email notification to activate it.

That’s it.

By the way, Google posted a blogpost about it. And the pop-up is shown like this:

How useful is this Gmail notification feature?

I think it’s useful if you are really waiting for an email or chat message from someone while browsing other websites or working for anything. But I think, the tab for the Gmail website should be there opened in the background.

A German news website called, Spiegel Online, captured the image below from the Google Maps – Street View. While we don’t know what really happened to that man in that car’s trunk, I wonder how do you interpret what has been shown on that photo.

Here’s few of the interpretation other readers made:

Interpretation 1

The man was actually spying his wife. So, he hid himself in that trunk. Then when Google Street View cars passed by, the man is about to get out of the trunk and follow his wife inside that house.

Interpretation 2

The man was actually cleaning his car. He was not actually totally naked. He was still wearing his underwear. See that dog lying? He’s actually sleeping which means that the dog knew the man because if the dog didn’t knew him, then it would be barking against him.

Interpretation 3

The man is actually a theft. He killed the dog. And He’s trying to hid himself in that trunk.

Interpretation 4

That man is the other man of the wife of the owner of that car. He was with the wife the owner of that house having enjoyed the few hours in heaven, making love with here. However, the husband of the woman suddenly came. He heard him coming and managed to escape from his sight. Now, since he’s still naked, so he hid inside that trunk.

Your Interpretation

How about your own interpretation? You can share it to us, anyway.

If you’ve visited today the Google homepage, you’ll notice the images shown in a series in the place where Google’s logo usually placed. Actually, the word Google is found in every images. You just need to find them as if you’re playing a puzzle.

And one more thing, the series of images actually tells us a story.

While kids are doing the Trick-or-Treating a group of ghosts scare them. This makes us wonder whether the ghosts are true or not. So, to solve this mystery, the group of Scooby Doo came driving the Mystery Machine van.

They give comfort to the scared kids and started to investigate. Scooby Doo helps the investigation using his powerful sniffing talent.

They are investigating the road where the ghosts passed by. It was already night but then a group of men still playing basketball in nearby basketball court.

While investigating, Scooby Doo and his partner are attacked by the ghosts. They are surprised and scared, and so they run fast as they can. The ghosts are running after them when the ball accidentally thrown towards the ghosts.

The ghosts are hit by the ball. Thus exposing who are behind the ghosts who are scaring kids. Finally, Scooby Doo and his group solved the mystery.

Happy Halloween!