Webmasterworld conference day 1

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This is my fourth Webmasterworld conference and the second one (for me) in Las Vegas. I went to Orlando 2004 and New Orleans 2005. The 2007 event feels as though it was almost yesterday, so here I am once again. Note: I will update this post with more details and images when I get home. (If someone has a better photograph of me, please send it to me)
Photographs at Flickr.

Agenda

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Brett Tabke opened proceedings and made the observation that only one third of the sessions could be described as pure SEO. The rest covered affiliate marketing, PPC, social media, and so on.

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Shawn Rorick from Cirque du Soleil delivered the keynote address, which covered the changing nature of the Internet, particularly how the Internet was better exploited by Barack Obama than John McCain. He introduced a new phrase, “Halo Media”, which means that users decide when/how/where they will consume media.

Top-Shelf Organic SEO

  • Bruce Clay, Bill Hunt, Ash Nallawalla, Jill Whalen
  • moderator: Mark Jackson

Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International spoke about Keyword Relevance via Prominence. Keywords should be placed in prominent parts of each page, such as the Title, Heading and so on.

After making pages relevant, you need quality backlinks from equally relevant sites and the anchor text needs to be keyword-rich.

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Ash Nallawalla from Sensis focussed on Content, using the experience of the Yellow Pages® (Australia) site as an example. As with all advertising-based sites, Sensis needs people to look at advertiser content, namely their Yellow Pages listings. A business profile page has relatively little content compared to a regular website, so getting it to rank is not easy. Adding text to each advertiser’s page can’t be accomplished quickly.

Ash outlined several content-based strategies that deliver value to the reader and they can choose to proceed to the listings or not. One trial that has worked well is a home improvement magazine that gets over 700 visits a day, just six weeks since its launch.

Here is a link to a longer account of this session at BruceClay.com.

Search Engine Roundtable coverage of this session.

PPC Engine Vendor Panel

  • Patrizio Spagnoletto, Frederick Vallaeys, Dustin Kwan, Doug Stotland
  • moderator: Brad Geddes

Understanding The Complex Social Marketing Playing Field

  • Cameron Olthuis, Neil Patel, Michael Gray, Rand Fishkin
  • moderator: Joe Laratro

Effective Affiliate Strategies

  • Jim Banks, David Rivero, Elisabeth Archambault, Dixon Jones
  • moderator: Aaron Shear

Game On : Rocking Your Video Startup

  • Robin Liss, Brett Tabke, Michael McDonald
  • moderator: Stephen Baker

Interactive Site Reviews: Focus on Organic

  • Seth Wilde, Carolyn Shelby, Vanessa Fox, Jiyan Wei
  • moderator: Jim Banks

Being an Effective SEO Within Your Organization

  • Jessica L Bowman, Scott Polk, Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Alex Schultz
  • moderator: Lou Ragg

Tony Adam from Yahoo spoke about the practical aspects of being an in-house SEO. He gave practical tips such as:

  • Knowing who are the stakeholders in your company.
  • Getting to know your colleagues, their personality types and who can help your agenda.
  • Knowing what projects are under way and whether you can add SEO value to them.

Ideally, the SEO should be plugged into the company’s strategy map and have several opportunities to contribute. SEO training should be arranged for the entire organisation – obviously tailored to the audience. SEO knowledge can also be imparted through the internal communication channels.

Most important, show your passion for SEO and get colleagues enthused!

Navigating The Complex World of PPC Engines

  • Christine Churchill, Microsoft Representative, Andrew Beckman
  • moderator: Melanie Mitchell

The main takeaway for me from Alexander Barbara was that social media sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Hugg, Twitter, etc is that their traffic quality varies and they do not convert as well as targeted traffic would. If your business appeals to this audience then it might suit you.

Earning Big Bucks With Social Media Traffic

  • Vanessa Fox, Michael Gray, Alexander Barbara
  • moderator: Rand Fishkin

Balancing Income Channels Between Affiliates and Ads

  • Jim Banks, Jon Kelly, Adam Jewell
  • moderator: Joe Laratro

Video Search Engine Optimisation

  • Mark Robertson, Edward Kim, Gregory Markel, Grant Crowell
  • moderator: Robin Liss

Interactive Site Reviews: Open Call

  • Kate Morris, Wil Reynolds, Craig Paddock, Guillaume Bouchard
  • moderator: Gord Hotchkiss

Universal and Personal Search – This Changes Everything

  • Brian Combs, Greg Boser, Amanda Watlington
  • moderator: Jake Baillie

Keyword Research, Selection and Optimisation

  • Ken Jurina, Larry Mersman, Wil Reynolds, Stoney deGeyter
  • moderator: Christine Churchill

Social Media : The Big Sexy Buzz

  • Guillaume Bouchard, Kent Schoen, Brian Carter, Warren Whitlock
  • moderator: Roger B. Dooley

Affiliate Based PPC Issues and Options

  • Adam Jewell, David Naffziger
  • moderator: Jon Kelly

Video Engines – New Kids Rocking The Web

  • Cuong Do, Chase Norlin, Henry Hall, Stephen Baker
  • moderator: Brett Tabke

Interactive Site Reviews: Focus on Video

  • Grant Crowell, Gregory Markel, Michael McDonald, Mark Robertson
  • moderator: Chris Winfield

Organic Keyword Research and Selection

  • Eric Papczun, Seth Wilde, Craig Paddock, Carolyn Shelby
  • moderator: Mark Jackson

Landing Page Optimisation

  • Brad Geddes, Lily Chiu, Kate Morris
  • moderator: Christine Churchill

Is Social Media & Search a Love Story or a War Story?

  • David Wallace, Chris Winfield, Liana Evans, Bill Hartzer
  • moderator: Lawrence Coburn

Your Relationship With The Affiliate Manager

  • Bob Rains, Shawn Collins, Brook Schaaf, Beth Kirsch
  • moderator: Lisa Riolo

Video and Multimedia Advertising – Show Me The Money!

  • Mort Greenberg, Angela Lauria, Bob Bahramipour
  • moderator: Joseph Morin

Interactive Site Reviews: Focus on Affiliates

  • Adam Jewell, David Rivero, Elisabeth Archambault
  • moderator: Jill Whalen

Discover Techniques Used by Enterprise-Level SEOs/SEMs

  • Marshall D. Simmonds, Bill Hunt, Ash Nallawalla, Scott Polk
  • moderator: Joe Laratro

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Ash Nallawalla from Sensis gave an insight into the corporate SEO’s challenges. Essentially, things happen at a slower pace as corporations become larger.

  • The website can have millions of pages, so keyword selection is limited to a handful of key terms
  • There is greater emphasis on site architecture and strategy
  • Changes can be slow to implement and costly
  • Many stakeholders have to be consulted
  • As a bonus, it is easier to get unsolicited links
  • Web platforms are chosen for many reasons, but seldom SEO.
  • Web design and site architecture practices might not have taken SEO into account.
  • The web pages might not contain a lot of text.
  • Others might not link if you require them to link only in certain ways.
  • Duplicate content can occur when multinational companies copy the same pages from the parent site, or when content is licensed from a third-party specialist provider.

Ash then presented a case study of the Australian Yellow Pages website where IT resources were limited owing to other competing projects and how good SEO value was extracted. Sometimes the corporate SEO must make do.

Coverage of this session by Search Engine Roundtable.

Large Scale Bid Management

  • Chris Zaharias, Jon Kelly, Kevin Lee
  • moderator: Ken Jurina

Tag, You’re It! How To Leverage Your Visitors

  • Dan Zarrella, Brian Breslin, Geoff Livingston
  • moderator: Todd Malicoat

Working With Affiliate Networks

  • Karen White, Jamie Birch, Durk Price
  • moderator: Chuck Hamrick

Real World VodCasting and Vlogging

  • Vanessa Zamora, Brett Tabke
  • moderator: Brett Tabke

Interactive Site Reviews: Focus on SEO Design and Usability

  • Ted Ulle, Jill Sampey, Amanda Watlington, Eric Papczun
  • moderator: Jessica L Bowman

Google changes webmaster guidelines

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Current Google Webmaster Guidelines.

They no longer contain two lines:

  • Have other relevant sites link to yours.
  • Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Does this mean “links no longer required?”

Juhn Mueller, a Google employee based in Switzerland has responded, making two points (paraphrased):

  • Google should not have named specific directories. If a directory brings you quality traffic, go for it.
  • The wording suggested that one should “make” (force) other sites to link to ours. You should make it easy for others to link to you.

Link to Google Groups thread. (apologies for old news – this one lay forgotten in my Drafts folder)

Back from Search Engine Room 2008

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Speaking at SER 2008

Last Tuesday, 7 October 2008, I attended Search Engine Room in Sydney. I was one of the speakers and here is the full list.

  • Justin Baird, Product Specialist, Google
  • Sandeep Baruah, Group Manager – Online and Search & Directories, Sensis
  • Grace Chu, Managing Director, FirstClick
  • Chris Dimmock, Founder, Cogentis
  • Foad Fadaghi, Technology Editor, BRW
  • Chris Garner, Online Strategic Marketing Consultant, dgm
  • Tom Petryshen, CEO, Amplify
  • Cheryl Gledhill, Co-Founder, Molt:n Digital
  • Scott Gledhill, Co-Founder, Molt:n Digital
  • Frank Grasso, CEO, e-Channel
  • David Hawking, Chief Scientist, Funnelback
  • Rod Jacka, Managing Director, Panalysis
  • Michael Walmsley, GM – Competitive Intelligence and Search Marketing, Hitwise
  • Ash Nallawalla, Traffic Manager, Online Search & Directories, Sensis
  • Gary Ng, Director, E-Web Marketing
  • Jon Ostler, Founder, First Rate
  • Darren Rowse, ProBlogger
  • Marcelo Silva, General Manager, Outrider Australia
  • Jonathan Sinton, Strategy Director, Research International
  • Yury Shar, Director, Hotels Combined
  • Jim Stewart, Director, StewArtMedia.biz
  • Nathan Stewart, CEO, Alkemi
  • Chris Thomas, General Manager, Reseo.com
  • Lesley White, Head of Digital, Network PR
  • Susan Zabeti, Director, GroupM Search Australia

My presentation covered the challenges of corporate SEOs. The slide pack should be online at the SER website soon, but in brief I mentioned that large sites have many stakeholders and seemingly “obvious” SEO tactics cannot be executed in a short time-span. Here are my photographs from the event on Flickr.

Physician (PageRank kind), heal thyself

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This site needs some PR love badly!I got one of those daily unsolicited emails from Indian outsourcing wannabes to my training business address. Of course, it was from a Gmail address from someone called “Leon Dawson” at a company called PR4 Links. My training business is hardly likely to need link outsourcing services, but spammers don’t really care about that.

I am not sure if that came from the company that calls itself PR4 Links Consultants, as they live one postcode away from the spammer. Nevertheless, I should connect the two with one another as the website certainly could do with some more PR love to get it to PR4. Sad to say, it’s only getting a no-follow from this page. 🙁

How to opt out of the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks

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Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all serve cookies that help (them) to serve you ads that match your search behaviour. This might be OK for some, but it gets annoying when you see irrelevant ads because someone else used your PC. For instance, I often buy stuff from Amazon for others and their website assumes I only buy for myself. So I get prompts about knitted toys, strange music and Harry Potter. You can opt out of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo advertising to some extent.

Opting Out of Google

Google’s home page (the Simple search, not Advanced) has a “Privacy” link at the bottom. Click it. You will be taken to the Privacy Policies page, where you will see a list of Google services. Click Advertising, which will lead you to a page explaining how you can opt out of the Google Content Network. You can also click the image above, as it is linked to the opt-out button. You cannot avoid seeing Google AdWords on Google Search unless you use a third-party ad blocking tool.

Opting Out of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) Member Ad Networks

The Google page helpfully links to this organisation, which has a convenient link to the NAI Opt Out Tool, which lets you out of seeing targeted ads. Remember, you will see ads, but not ones the ad servers thinks are relevant to you. I am not sure whether it is better to see random ads or targeted ones. You can choose to opt out of any or all of the following ad networks:

The single-click method doesn’t work for all the above, so be sure to check on the next page which ones you need to opt out of individually.

Strangely, BlueLithium told me I had opted out in large blue text, but it did not find a cookie, and that I had not opted out.

Opting Out of Live/Microsoft and Partner Advertising

You will find the opt-out form on the Personalised Advertising page.

How Opt Out Works

The opt-out process places an “opt-out” cookie on your computer. This opt-out cookie tells the ad network not to collect your non-personally identifiable information in order to tailor their campaigns for your. If you delete, block or otherwise restrict cookies, or if you use a different computer or web browser, or you format your hard drive, you will need to renew your opt-out choices from that PC or browser. The NAI tool serves third-party cookies to achieve its objective and a browser set to High or Medium privacy setting won’t cooperate with the tool.

Google has a sitemap.xml file!

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Google has a sitemap.xml file.
Google has a sitemap.xml file.

We should not be surprised by this factoid, but check out hxxp://www.google.com/sitemap.xml (replace xx with tt). It is 4 MB in size. If you thought that it would be a sitemap index file consisting of thousands of sitemaps, you’d be mistaken.

The file is 142,111 lines long, which means there are 35,527 URL entries in it. What are the interesting pages?

  • http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/overview.html looks interesting, but try loading it in your browser and you are taken to http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/index.html
  • http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain doesn’t load, but you end up at http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new. Weird.
  • http://www.google.com/a/interest leads to http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/interest, which happens to be a 404. Will Google get penalised? Will it lose PR? [I am just parodying forum newbies, relax.]
  • There are plenty of pages relating to ads – AdWords and AdSense, which is to be expected. The usual corporate pages, April Fool gags, zeitgeist, etc.
  • Numerous foreign-language versions of its content for its overseas markets.
  • Numerous university searches, such as http://www.google.com/univ/calpoly – where is Gopher these days?
  • Only the home page has a priority of 1.0; the rest are all 0.5.

Google also has a robots.txt file, but it doesn’t reference this sitemap.

Yes, a pretty small site, if you took out the non-English content. All fits in a single sitemap.xml file. :lol:

Peering into spam

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More on the theme of stupid or lazy spammers – I often wonder about the spam that is not geo-targeted. I get dire “warnings” allegedly from banks I have never heard of, such as Abbey Bank. Is it run by some monks? I have never sold anything on eBay, but I am often the recipient of “complaints” against me.

Usually the reason for such spam is phishing, where silly little me is supposed to panic and log into what looks like eBay or my bank. I imagine that after supplying my password or PIN, I would get to an error page and I would give up wondering what that was all about. Then some criminal collects all these passwords and drains their owners’ accounts.

Some of these emails carry an attachment that you are supposed to open, thereby infecting your PC with a virus or Trojan. Here is what one contained:

From: Merrill Cormier US Airways [weh@brascabos.com.br]
Attachment: eTicket#1721.zip (133B)
#######################################################################
Panda Antivirus 2007 warning:

The file eTicket#1721.zip [eTicket#1721.exe] was infected by the W32/Nuwar.XR.worm virus and has been disinfected.
#######################################################################

Good day,
Thank you for using our new service “Buy airplane ticket Online” on our website.
Your account has been created:

Your login: blah@<my domain>
Your password: passLI6W

Your credit card has been charged for $459.30.
We would like to remind you that whenever you order tickets on our website you get a discount of 10%!
Attached to this message is the purchase Invoice and the airplane ticket.
To use your ticket, simply print it on a color printed, and you are set to take off for the journey!

Kind regards,
Merrill Cormier
US Airways

I know that I don’t fly US Airways and wouldn’t even open the email, but I was in the mood to check the current crop. I suspect that the spammer has never bought an airline ticket online and has no clue what a real confirmation email looks like. Perhaps he is a hapless soul in South Ossetia or Beijing.

The next suspicious item was the attachment – no meaningful document can be 133 bytes, even when zipped. Real world attachments of this kind tend to be PDFs, which don’t shrink much when zipped, so they are sent uncompressed. Had I been a novice user, Panda Antivirus 2007 would have saved me, as the text above confirms.

The attached infection W32/Nuwar@MM is an email spam worm – McAfee has a long and interesting description of its purpose and behaviour at http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_140835.htm. The zip file contains an executable file – this assumes the user will double-click it after opening the zip file. This file installs a tiny mail SMTP server on the infected PC. It finds email addresses on this PC and then sends spam to all of them, (which makes it a worm).

Novice users who know other novice users unwittingly help to propagate this nasty worm, as they recognise the apparent sender’s name.

I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 and I viewed the email’s “Options”, which contain the following lines:

Return-path: <abc@brascabos.com.br>
Envelope-to: <my email address>
Delivery-date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:04:15 +0000
Received: from [83.218.133.218] (helo=83-218-133-218.spitfireuk.net)
by .com with esmtp (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from <abc@brascabos.com.br>)
id 1KODCR-0000nZ-QL
for <my email address>; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:04:15 +0000
Received: from [83.218.133.218] by mx.brascabos.com.br; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:02:36 +0000
From: “Merrill Cormier” US Airways
To: <my email address>
Subject: E-ticket #4919898619
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:02:36 +0000
Message-ID: <01c8f255$4d1dce00$da85da53@abc>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_000E_01C8F255.4D1DCE00″
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.3790.2663
Importance: Normal
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.1
X-Spam-Score: 11
X-Spam-Bar: +
X-Spam-Flag: NO

The email contents don’t contain the spammy words you see in the “Nigerian” spam emails, so the anti-spam checker at my server was fooled into giving it a low spam score and it got into my Inbox instead of the Outlook Junk E-mail folder.

The Brazilian email address (anonymised here) is probably harvested from a customer of Spitfire ADSL, a UK ISP, which has been allocated the IP address block 83.218.130.0 – 83.218.133.255. Only the ISP would know which of its customers was using that IP address at that time and sent me that email. Even so, we won’t know if the ISP’s customer was the one who passed on the worm or their PC was infected into being a proxy server for yet another infected PC.

I also received a similar disinfected spam email made to look from JetBlue Airways, wherever they might be. Same contents, same worm.

Nothing new here – just a deeper look at the day’s spam.

Lamest spam email

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We all get spam. I get over 200 a day after some more emails are filtered out by spam removal tools at the servers. I rarely open them unless something about its size or subject wording catches my eye. This one did:

This is an enquiry e-mail via http://<one of my sites> from:
Michelle <michelle@keywordspy.com>

I found this great adwords tool KeywordSpy.com . I’m using it and it has really improved my profits. It offers Free trials. – http://www.keywordspy.com/

“Michelle” or whatever his name is (spammers are always male) must be incredibly lazy or incredibly clever. Why on earth would anyone use Keyword Spy when Axandra IBP does a far better job among a host of other great features? I intend to review it soon and have used it since version 8.

Let’s spread some link love to other recipients of the same or similar email:

Adventures in Black Hat Land

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Blackhat forum
Blackhat forum

Blackhat World is a fascinating forum full of discussions supposedly about the black hat side of SEO. It turns out to be more about sharing cracked versions of scripts and programs, backdoors to ebooks without paying for them, links to spam tools, and so on.

You can post links to ebooks, as long as you don’t post the links of products authored by BHW members. I became aware of tools that help spamming, such as GYC Automator, which lets you create “as many Craigslist accounts and also create and manage corresponding Gmail and Yahoo! email accounts.” The marketing literature gushes, “Key to good business is good marketing and for good marketing you have to utilize Craigslist at its maximum. To do so you must post as many as 500 or more ads per day and use at least 500 active email accounts to be able to make this happen. It is difficult and time taking process to create and manage such number of accounts manually, it will keep you busy in creating email accounts and hardly you will get time to post ads.” Poor Craigslist sysadmins – they must have their work cut out for them.

Another hot topic is cookie stuffing, a way to drop, say, your Amazon affiliate cookie on your visitors, so that if they visit Amazon and buy, you get your commission. You may have seen companies that sell you “traffic” to any website of your choice. These are not real human visitors but browsers that open a tiny window on people’s PCs but they never realise they “visited” your site. You can get software to generate such visits – pretty pointless for making money, but they can help to inflate your visitor count for sites such as YouTube or Alexa rankings. If you stuff cookies, you will need this kind of junk traffic, otherwise your affiliate clicks will equal the number of buyers and you’ll be kicked out by the affiliate network.

I also learnt that Alexa’s search crawler does not look at robots.txt, so it knows all pages of a website, including the “thank you” pages that have a link to a purchased file. There is an entire thread full of Google, Yahoo and Alexa search terms that could lead to “free” downloads.

Edward Lewis Desphinns Sphinn

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PageOneResultsI should be in bed but I blame Edward Lewis for posting what must be the biggest expose since the Washington Post exposed Watergate:

The Sphinn Exposé

In brief, Sphinn terminated his account for what appears to be his investigative work about Sphinn. I know very little about the daily operations of this search marketing industry counterpart to Digg, but I think they made a mistake in terminating his account. My reputation or livelihood does not depend on stories I sphinn or desphinn, but I visit it regularly to see what stories have received sufficient votes to be deemed really new and interesting.

Apparently there are a few individuals who game the system and spam it. Edward exposed some of them and exposed other chinks in the armour. I will read the long post later but I have seen enough to feel thoroughly entertained, but sad that Sphinn terminated his account. After reading it fully I will be in a better position to judge Sphinn, but my gut feeling is that they made a big mistake that will polarise the SEO community and affect Sphinn’s reputation.

I have a lot of respect for Edward although I have never met him. He is a long-standing moderator at Webmasterworld and makes very knowledgeable posts. Take the time to read the Exposé.

WebProNews eBusiness Directory update

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Submission receivedWebProNews writer Chris Crum has responded to an earlier post about the eBusiness Directory. Thanks, all understood and best wishes, like I originally said. We do need good directories.

An update on my experience: I received six, yes, six acknowledgments for my two submissions (or was it for just one of them – can’t tell from the generic response). No, I did not make multiple submissions, so there must have been a glitch somewhere.

Thank you for confirming your recent submission to webpronews.

If approved, your listing will be live within 3 to 5 business days.

Either my sites did not make the grade, or there is a dmoz-like queue of sites waiting to be approved. I’ll try submitting some top-tier sites (that I do not own) and see if they show up. You should do likewise and help make it a terrific directory!

AdSense is testing new fonts

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AdSense showing Comic Sans fontGoogle is testing new fonts for some publishers in its AdSense ads. The image at right shows Microsoft’s Comic Sans font, which accompanies Microsoft Office (or Windows). I didn’t alter the JavaScript for the ad, but I came to the ad from a Google Search, so I suspect that was where Google noted in my environment variables that I have Office and Windows loaded.

I checked Webmasterworld and found that I was not alone. Others have noted fonts such as Times New Roman and Georgia, but I was not able to replicate such fonts by reloading the page. I don’t use the Comic Sans font anywhere and I agree that it makes a professional page look amateurish – I belong to a nonprofit organisation where another volunteer keeps using it in conference flyers.

Nevertheless, many AdSense publishers have blended these ads into their pages so well that a visitor might accidentally click an ad that looks like a menu selection. By changing the font at random, Google can reduce this possibility. While it may seem that Google is reducing its income from such accidental clicks, the advertiser will appreciate getting a higher conversion rate because the clicks will come from people who intended to click the ad.

“AdSense Advisor” in another Webmasterworld thread confirmed that this is a test and they are monitoring the results. I hope that Google retains the random fonts but omits Comic Sans from the repertoire.

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