It was only a matter of time before Google went public with its plan to swing a heavy axe through the blog comment spam jungle. It seems comment spammers are now going to have to watch their backs when it comes to link dropping all over the place.

Such news is also putting the fear of God in some legitimate commenters as well. Determining what is spam and what is not is a purely subjective opinion best left to blog owners and not an algorithm or a Google Webspam employee that may not like your comment.

I think we’ve all had the problem before as webmasters. You know, you add a new page or create a new website and the Google Adsense ads are completely off topic and irrelevant. And we’ve heard the standard solutions to fix the problem, and in many cases they work as intended. The problem is this: What if highly relevant ads are not generating the profit, the CTR, and the interest of your visitors?

This is a current problem I am struggling with. The site in question is what many would consider an authority. It gets good traffic, has plenty of natural backlinks, great organic search positions, and of course a significant amount of traffic. The problem is that the people visiting the page are not interested in the ads that Google believes should be displayed. The ads I think should be displayed pay ten times as much and receive twice the CTR when they are displayed. The problem is displaying them permanently.

In many of the popular webmaster related forums you can usually find a section on link sales. Yes, backlinks are the holy grail of SEO these days, but did you know that many of these paid links are absolutely worthless? Let me explain in more detail…

Let’s face it, Google is a master at analyzing data. From Google analytics to their own algorithm, Google does a pretty darn good job at crunching the number and detailing data. And part of their technology is devoted to identifying paid links. How does Google do it? Of course that is open to debate, but let me share some of my opinions and you make your own call.

Aaron Wall broke the news on his site about Google’s new algorithm update.  Supposedly, this update places heavy emphasis on a site’s “brand.”  You can read more about Aaron’s take on this issue here.

There are a good number of people complaining about this algorithm update.  Apparently some sites have lost their ranks to more noteworthy brands.  This certainly could be the reason why so many webmasters think big name companies are getting preference in the serps over their more relevant websites.

To put some water on this fire, Matt Cutts has publicly acknowledged that a change was recently made to Google’s algorithm.  According to Matt, this is not a major update but one of the 300-400 minor updates they make yearly.  Matt also noted that the change would probably not even be noticed by the majority of webmasters.

For those that like to submit to quality premium web directories, this post is for you!

Over at Directory Blogger, they have recently posted some coupon codes to use at some of the Web’s top directories.  Some of these coupon codes expire soon, so take advantage of it while you can.

To get these coupon codes, simply go to Directory Blogger’s web directory coupon code page and get busy. 

If you know of any other directories that have coupon codes, please comment here.  Especially in today’s economy its always nice to save some money!

For all of those domainers that park domains, Google is finally allowing Adsense to be placed on parked domains.  That’s right, this is a full blow parking service provided by Google and is available to all USA Adsense accounts.

Apparently from December 11th, 2008 to December 18th, 2008 all Adsense accounts will have this feature enabled.  If its not in your account yet, be patient.

Unlike most parking providers, Adsense requires participants to create A name and CNAME records for each domain added to the Adsense for Domains parking program.  Providing your domain(s) are using your Registrars nameservers, this is not a big deal unless you plan to serve Adsense on a large number of parked domains.  Hopefully Google will decide to handle each domains DNS in the future which would certainly make the parking program easier for people to use.

If you notice in my previous posts, PageRank has been a big issue lately.  The 9/26/2008 PR update had some major problems, some of which included pages only days old getting assigned PR.  It appears Google has responded to this outcry and has rolled back the PR to its previous state on 9/25/2008.

At first there was a lot of commotion about the 9/26/2008 PR update.  Many deserving Websites lost PR and new pages, not even a week old, gained PR.  After some thought, I wonder if the PR update we saw was Google’s internal PR being exported.  The evidence seems to point in that direction.

As I noted in my last post, the latest Google PR update on 9/26/2008 was quite abnormal.  Deserving sites that should have got PR actually lost PR.  Undeserving and/or sites not promoted gained PR.  The day after this PR update, and on Google’s birthday, Webmasters are lashing out at Google.  Some are even calling Google’s PR algorithm as being broken and badly neglected.

Here’s some highlights of the talk going on…

In this Digital Point post, a Website owner claims that he received a PR 3 on a page that he posted just yesterday.  He claims it is not even indexed in Google Search yet.

Also in the same thread, this post from another Webmaster claims he received a PR 2 from a blog post he made just days prior.

Well, here comes yet another Google PR update.  It seems that with each update I am left scratching my head how and why Google calculates PR.

I’m not going to name any URLs, but just visualize this.  Two PR 3 directories, which were created about the same time, each having a much different backlink profile.  I will take a look at these in more detail in this post.

The first PR 3 directory has a total of 905 backlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer.  Looking at these backlinks, I can see that none have any PR.  In fact, most of the links are from other directories.

When it comes to link building, a great way to develop links is to comment on blogs.  Now I’m not talking about comment spam, but real genuine comments to the posted article.  Quite a few people do this, and many are finding that when they submit their comments they are going to a blank page.

Spam is a huge problem for bloggers.  Just last week I received over 3,000 spam comments.  Fortunately I run Akismet, a plugin for Wordpress that is intended to combat the onslaught of blog spam.  The downside to this is that good/genuine comments can be returned as a false positive.