With FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost posted in the sidebar of my other blog which had PR 3, in less than 2 weeks I noticed the blog’s PR dropped to 0. However I have no actual proof that the reason why the PR dropped is BuzzBoost but I can’t seem to find another plausible explanation.
Is BuzzBoost actually hearting SEO ? I know that Google doesn’t like duplicate content and so I’ve heard that it will skip indexing any pages that publish duplicate content. I did a little bit of researching and found this interview regarding the duplicate content issue.

…And, I think the search engines explicitly understand what a feed is. It’s very simple for them to recognize a feed during their crawl and they act on that by concluding that the feed is not a permanent place for the content, and therefore eliminating the duplicate content concern that you alluded to. It’s not to say that it’s an irrational concern, but in many cases, it’s not one that the publisher should be really concerned about. I think the search engines are increasingly very smart about understanding the difference between a feed and webpage, and understand the purpose of the feed as indicating where the content lives.

Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services at FeedBurner

Source of the interview: StoneTemple

I have removed FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost widget and now I’m waiting to see if my PR will be back again (this should happen in approximately 3-4 weeks or so).

However Google states that articles syndicated with a link back to the original article should not be a problem.
If you wonder if your content has been copied (of course now I am referring to intentionally content copying) you can always use Copyscape to determine who is copying your content.

If you find out that your content is being copied you might want to refer to Google’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act

It’s very hard for me to believe that BuzzBoost is the actual cause of my problem but I can’t imagine anything else being the source of my PR drop. For the moment this is all the information I have and as soon as I find anything else related to this issue I will post it here.

These were my BuzzBoost settings:

If you also encountered PR drops while having FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost installed on your blog/website feel free to leave a comment.

Google Hacks is a small tool that can definitely help you with your search on Google. Many of you out there use Google search engine more than 5 times a day. So why not trying to get the most of Google and display relevant and accurate search results.

You can use Google Hacks to search the web for the following files:

• Mp3
• Wma
• Ogg
• Pdf
• Txt
• Lit
• Rar
• Doc
• Rtf
• Chm
• Pps
• Zip
• Odt
• Mpg
• Avi
• Wmv
• Divx
• Flv
• Exe
• Ddl

What exactly this tool does, is to add a couple of smart filters to your search input. For example if you want to search for an exe file named “winamp” your search input will look like this:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(.exe) “winamp”

As you will see on the results page most of the links will begin with “Index of /” and they will take you to different ftp servers containing your required file(s).

You can also use Google Hacks to search for passwords in the following files: config.php, auth_user_file.txt and passlist.txt or inline url passwords. Lyrics, fonts, torrents, cache and web hosting categories are also available.

As the program itself states: “This program is for educational purposes only”. I don’t consider it a hacking tool or any kind of malicious software program. I like to consider it nothing more than a useful program that applies different filters available to the wide public to your search input in order to provide viable search results.

You can download this tool from it’s official project page over at Google Code.

In the end i want to clarify that the purpose of this article and/or program is not to encourage you to engage into a certain hacking activity !

About

GMail Drive offers you the chance of using your 6GB e-mail quota as a remote storage device. Practically you get to use ALL your available e-mail space for storing pictures, music, videos or anything else that fits ! The good part is that this way you don’t need to worry anymore about the progress bar indicating something like “< 10% of your e-mail storage space is being used”, which is really great. I think Gmail is a reliable e-mail service that carries out its tasks in an exceptional manner. Don’t forget about the fact that your 6 gigs are entirely FREE ! Enough with Gmail and Google advertising already :)

This great, yet small tool does nothing else but to actually create a partition-like icon in “My computer” through which you can connect to your 6GB of free remote “storage device” which is actually your Gmail account.

Installation

In order to use this tool you need to have IE 5 or above. After downloading the required archive (Mirror 1, Mirror 2) all you need to do is to unpack it and run Setup.exe. Once the process is complete you will see a window containing some text that confirms all went ok. After that close the window and go to “My Computer” and refresh your content.

Usage

Right click on the GMail Drive icon and choose “Login As”. Type in your username and password and hit OK. If you wish to configure your access further more you can do that by clicking the “More” button and choose from the available options like preserving your file names, use of your draft folder, secure http transfer or proxy authentification. That’s all you need to do in order to get access to your storage space. When you will send a file to the mail server you’ll see that a message will appear in your “Inbox” folder that will contain the corresponding attachment.

Conclusion

I don’t really know if this is 100% OK with Google but I figured out that they would have made some kind of modifications to the system if this wasn’t for some reasons in accordance with their TOS. GMail Drive could be of use for many people out there that don’t have another online storage alternative. Its progress animations, user-friendly interface make of it one small, easy to use yet helpful tool.

Here’s a tiny screencast I recorded (if I may call it this way) that shows you how to handle things. If you wish to see the original-sized clip feel free to download it (~1.6MB).

YouTube Softinquiry 

Wholinked is a great service that generates a javascript code which practically shows websites that link to you IN REAL TIME !  This can be your way of saying “thank you!”.

WhoLinked can be easily implemented in Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger, MovableType and other blogging platforms even on an ordinary website.

After you register, select your preferred platform and go ahead on customizing your list of links. You can choose the default language, the orientation and the number of links to display. The most important thing is that you can select which websites not to show.

If you want to see an example just check out my footer.

Everyone knows that CPC (cost-per-click) campaigns are more profitable than CPA (cost-per-action) campaigns. Why is that ? Simple. Because it’s less likely that a person who clicks on a certain product related ad to purchase it. However if someone actually does purchase the product you can gain for example approximatly a 10 clicks equivalent revenue. I’m not saying that CPC campaigns are much better than CPA campaigns because that’s not entirely true.

Now lets head to ShoppingAds and their “how it works” page. I must say that they really did a great job explaining the differences between the two types of publishers. Unfortunately they left something behind. Maybe it was deliberately or maybe they considered it too obviously to be mentioned. In this business nothing is “too obviously” and every aspect must be very clear for both parts !

As you can read on their page, after a few months (sometimes even a single day), depending on your traffic sources you might receive an invitation to join the Premium Publisher service (for free). After one month of using their ad service and consulting my report generated by Google Analytics which shows that US and Canadian traffic togheter represents more than 60% of my total traffic, i decide to send them an e-mail regarding the conversion to the Premium account.

It seems that the traffic source isn’t the only thing that stands between the Standard and the Premium accounts as this was the reply i received:

Hello,

I’m sorry, unfortunately we traditionally do not convert non-US or Canadian
based publishers.

Thanks for your inquiry.

So let me get this straight: it doesn’t matter that your site/blog receives substantially more US and Canadian visitors than from other countries, now you have to worry about you being a non-US or Canadian publisher. Say that’s fine with me (though it isn’t) but why didn’t they said so in the first place ? I found this out after a month (because i asked not because they were concerned about sharing this info with me) and i wonder: “What about others who wait… and wait… and wait the invitation to the premium account ?”. Someone should tell them that if they are not from US or Canada there’s not even a chance of getting their standard accounts converted to premium no matter where their traffic comes from !

One thing i can’t get: why does it has any relevance from where you are if you get most of your traffic from US and/or Canada ?

I hope the staff from ShoppingAds will self-notify themselves and correct this issue (or maybe they prefer to let it as it is).

Have you ever wondered how is it possible to integrate AdSense or any other ads into or between your Wordpress posts ? Of course you have. This method does not require any third-party plugins whatsoever. For example, we all know that on a single page only three AdSense ads will appear. I’ve seen people that added the ad code between their posts on the index page. Guess what ? The first ads showed up alright but the other ones not and this resulted in the loss of precious space as the spots where the ads should have been were left blank. You can implement this method very fast as it’s very simple and you don’t need to be an advanced coder to get it done !

If you want to integrate ads into your posts here’s what you need to do. First of all let’s begin with defining the CSS class we’ll be using.
The following code is for right-orientated ads (like the ones i use on my blog).

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.ad-right {
display:block;
float:right;
margin: 0px 0px 5px 10px;
}

The next code is for left-orientated ads.

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.ad-left {
display:block;
float:left;
margin: 5px 10px 0px 0px;
}

As you can see, the differences between the two classes are not so big. Feel free to play with them until you get the desired effect or if you don’t have any CSS knowledge at all you can use them as given. After you decide which class you will use, copy the code into your style.css. Thats it for the CSS part.

Let’s move along and edit our theme files. Whether you want to show your ads on the index page or the page containing just the article you will need to look for the following code:

<?php the_content(...

By default any wordpress theme will have that code in it’s template file and it doesn’t matter what’s after it because many themes use custom and different code. After you located the code be sure to add the following lines exactly before it:

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<div class="ad-right">
////Replace me with your ad code////
</div>

Replace the line that says so with your ad code. Notice the class that is used. You might want to change that with ad-left as i told you before.
Ok, so now you have in-content ads.

Now lets move forward and add some ads between your posts on the index page.
In your index page template find the following code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Again bare in mind that you may not find the exact code. If you don’t have that exact code just make sure you find the have_posts() function. Add the following code exactly before it:

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<?php
$post = 1;
$ad1 = 1;
$ad2 = 3;
$ad3 = 5;
?>

The above code uses the $ad1, $ad2, $ad3 variables to define after which posts the ads will be shown. The variable $post stores the post number and will be incremented later.
Now before the closing of the div that marks the ending of the post content (something like this < / div > < ! -- End of Post -- >) add the following lines:

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<?php if ($post == $ad1 || $post == $ad2 || $post == $ad3) { ?>
<p><center>
////Replace me with your ad code////
</center></p>
<?php }
$post++; ?>

As you can see at the end of the code we incremented the post variable.

If you want to know how to display ads from multiple advertising companies using the same code just drop me a comment and i will explain how to achieve that.

I’ve tested this method with ads from AdSense, BidVertiser, WidgetBucks, BlgAds, Chitika and AdBrite. The reason i’m not writing a tutorial for each of them is because all you need to do is to paste your ad code in the upper mentioned spot.