I stumbled upon the picture above while doing a vanity search for my name (because who in search doesn’t do vanity searches at least every once in a while!) and thought this was a cool example of crowd sourced content.

The Erie County chapter of the Ohio State University alumni association lets members submit photos of them doing the O-H-I-O around the globe. The above picture was taken in a remote stream outside of Cody, Wyoming after a great day of fly fishing.

Brands, organizations, and yes, even universities can leverage UGC to show personality and build brand enthusiasm.

Cool stuff!

All I got was a series of automated emails explaining why they can’t tell me why my account was disabled.

I started using AdSense in June of 2009, and at the time of being disabled, I had AdSense ads appearing on four sites, and in a good month would make maybe $50 in revenue.

A simple review of the AdSense policies makes it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that my websites fall well within Google’s guidelines. Each site had 100% unique & family friendly content, and I was by no means tricking or encouraging anyone to click my ads, I never clicked on my own ads, and as far as I can tell, I was 100% compliant with their tips & guidelines.

After a month or two of thought, here are my best guesses as to what might have happened:

1. Someone was intentionally clicking on my ads thinking they were “helping me out.” My sites mostly contain helpful guides & DIY articles, so someone grateful for the help might have been clicking. Maybe it was a family friend, admirer, or someone that simply didn’t know better. I viewed my AdSense account regularly, and even hours before it was disabled, and I didn’t notice anything wierd, but I suppose this is possible.
2. A click bomb attack – someone maliciously “click bombed” one (or all of) my sites with the intention of getting me banned.
3. A traffic spike falsely trigged an alarm in AdSense’s monitoring system that got me banned – one of my sites had a “viral” day on Facebook, generating almost 7,000 unique visitors in a 12 hour time frame (typically the site got around 500 visitors in that same time frame). According to Google, a traffic spike alone shouldn’t cause any alarms, but in this case maybe it did – I filed an appeal describing the traffic spike, but my appeal was rejected so its hard to know if this was it or not, especially since the appeal letter was also automated and I’m unsure if a human ever even reviewed my account.

Regardless of the reason, what really sucks is that I’m now banned from AdSense for life. All I got was an automated email saying my account was disabled, and another automated email saying my appeal was rejected.

Both emails link to the Disabled Account FAQ, which does a great job at telling you nothing. Each Frequently Asked Question is answered by basically saying “we can’t tell you why.” It’s worthless.

However one thing from the Disabled Account FAQ did catch my attention:

 If you feel that this decision was made in error, and if you can maintain in good faith that the invalid activity was not due to the actions or negligence of you or those for whom you are responsible, you may appeal the disabling of your account.

Well surely, the invalid activity was not due to actions of myself – I don’t even know what the invalid activity was!

And it surely wasn’t negligence, as I viewed my account (both in AdSense and Analytics dashboards) several times daily – other than a traffic spike, I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. I can say in good faith I wasn’t up to any shenningans and any invalid activity was completely out of my control.

To me, the loss of AdSense really hurt. Not because of the money – like I said earlier, I didn’t make much at all. I enjoyed AdSense for what it meant – that great content gets rewarded, that anyone could be a publisher, and that it was possible to make money on the internet even if you weren’t a retailer or major media outlet. I love the vision of AdSense, and think its revolutionary in terms of its ability to reward the blogosphere and help encourage new content to be created every single day.

Here’s How Google Should Fix AdSense

Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with the program when it’s working for you. What needs help is the support for when it’s not.

1. Provide an account representative for anyone that’s made over $100 (the minimum payment threshold). As I’m currently experimenting with alternatives to AdSense, I’m blown away that many of these companies (Chitkia, Bidvertiser, AdStract, etc) will give you a real life human support person the moment you sign up – that support person helps you implement the ad code, configure & optimize your site for the ads, and answers any questions you have. It seems like it would not only be smart, but also profitable, to provide support for AdSense beyond static FAQ pages and automated emails.
2. Provide alerts of suspicious or invalid activity – frankly, I don’t even know what “suspicious activity” looks like, as Google doesn’t explain what that means or how to identify it, they just instruct you to look for it. But let’s say that someone was regularly clicking on my ads – couldn’t Google send me a warning about that? I could then reach out to my readers and remind them not to click on the ads unless they’re truly interested in transacting with the advertiser, or I could reach out to my Facebook & Twitter friends and just make sure none of them are clicking my ads or know anyone that might be. Given there are “intelligence” reports in Analytics, I’d assume an automated warning system could be created for AdSense quite easily using the same technology.
3. At least tell us why you’re disabling our accounts. I still don’t know. Even a generalized category of why my account was banned – e.g. repeated clicks from a single user, inappropriate content, etc. Then blog posts like this could serve as warnings to others to help them stay in compliance with Google’s policies. Even after being banned, I have no idea what I could or should have done differently. I get that you can’t give away too much information, but there has to be a balance between not giving out too much information and not giving out anything…
4. Give second chances –  whatever happened, I’m sorry and I wouldn’t let it happen again – in fact, I’d be 1000% times more paranoid of invalid activity than before, even if that means I’d be hurting my click through rate by telling everyone I know to never click on my ads no matter what. I’m basically begging Google to let me make money for them (as they get a very generous cut of any publisher’s earnings), all I ask for is a second chance. Without it, I can’t help but view Google in a negative light, which affects my interest in using Google for anything (search, email, social networking, etc).
5. Provide partial bans or probations instead – lets say my account did look suspicious for whatever reason – why not ban me for 3 months? Or a year? Banning for life, without any warning, seems kind of harsh. A three month ban would send the message while still allowing a second chance to participate and earn more money for Google.
6. Ban a website, not an entire account – what if one of my websites was in violation, say perhaps because I borrowed a picture without giving image credit (something I’ve inevitably done before). If that were to happen, and it were a problem with the website’s content, couldn’t you just ban that website specifically, and not a user’s entire account? Google AdSense policies state that each person can only have one account, and all websites owned by a person should use the same AdSense account. Unfortunately, now that my entire account is disabled, I can’t use AdSense on any of my sites, instead of just not being able to use it on the one that had violated some (still unknown) policy.

Providing human support for AdSense would only help grow the revenue they generate by educating bloggers on how to maximize profits from the program and minimize fraudulent clicks – a win-win-win for webmasters, advertisers and Google themselves, both finanicially and otherwise.

Like I said earlier, I think AdSense is a revolutionary product. It’s too bad Google doesn’t agree with me – if they truly saw the value in the program, they’d offer human support for it.

• Educate Your Team on Search Friendly Web Design – Part of the “Designing for Visiblity” series, giving tips on how to successful design (or re-design) your website to be successful in search, and how to engage your web design team in Search Marketing education.
• Tips for Using Google to Search for Twitter Related Results – Some advice and pointers to find relevant tweets and twitter related results through Google’s search engine.
• Is Google Suddenly Addicted to Speed? – A post overviewing Google’s recent discussion around the importance of page load speed, and why webmasters should take a look at their pages and try to make them load quicker (I’m a hypocrite here, as NicksCarBlog is horrendously slow…I just haven’t had time!)
• Google’s Proposal for Crawling AJAX: A post discussing Google’s adoption of a new protocol to crawl and index AJAX websites, and what websites should or should not implement it.

So, if you’re looking for some fun SEO related reading, I suggest you go check out http://greatfinds.icrossing.com or add the RSS feed to your preferred Reader. And as always, I’m tweeting away at @nickroshon as well

Image via Wikipedia

I really need to get off a shared server. It’s cheap, but then you could be sharing your server with someone up to no good…

Also, time to install a boat-load of security plug-ins. My blog was hacked by accessing the wp-config.php file, and this site has a good tip on how to lock that down, as well as encrypting passwords and other stuff: 18 Plugins & Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Blog

I’ve deleted any information about the hacker since he told me how he was able to hijack my blog – luckily, he only got into the wordpress admin and not the server or any of the backend. I will be moving everything to a new server soon – stay tuned, and pardon any interruptions in the meantime.

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• The 5 Minute WordPress Security Audit (idea15.wordpress.com)

I get what they’re going for: Simplicity. But Posterous is simplicity to a fault.

Designed for those who want to “life-stream,” or simply micro-blog daily events, sometimes of trivial significance, it does well at providing an easy-to-publish-on-the-go platform. I posted several times from my BlackBerry Pearl without issue, and my Pearl isn’t exactly high-tech anymore (although, if you forget to change the subject line, your post might be called IMG00007.jpg, doh!). It also automatically posts to Facebook, Twitter, and other common services, which isn’t really unique but I suppose it’s a feature Posterous does have and does well at. It also has very easy Google Analytics integration, but that pretty much wraps up everything nice I can say about it.

Now the downside, or all of the features it’s missing:

• Customization: I know Posterous is a relatively new service, founded in May, 2009, but still….it took until mid-September to roll-out very basic theming like changing your background color, much like Twitter’s theming customization.
• AdSense: Zip, Zilch, Notta. If I build up my blog or website, I want to put Ads on it. Not possible, no widgets whatsoever for this service. They don’t even put AdSense on their own stuff to make money (apparently start-ups don’t need to generate revenue anymore, right Twitter?)
• Blogroll: You can make a pseudo blog-roll called “My Other Sites” which will display links to Facebook, Picasa, Twitter, etc, but it’s really limited to about 6 services. No other links or text that you can get to carry over to individual post pages, etc. I have other blogs and websites I want to link to throughout my blog, and I can’t. So if I want to generate traffic to my other websites, I’ll have to link in every single post (spammy!)
• Editing Photo/Video Galleries: You can’t. Once they’re posted, they become cryptic pieces of code you can’t do anything about. Want to change the order of the images in the Gallery? Tough.

Posterous can (and should) implement features like those above and they wouldn’t lose any of their simplicity. Users can setup their blog to include widgets, adsense, blog rolls and custom photo/video galleries if they feel like it and are technically inclined, or they can continue to post without them for as long as they want (much like WordPress out-of-the-box).

As a professional SEO consultant, my job is to help websites gain more traffic, which leads to more impressions, conversions & revenue. If you can’t display ads, can’t do e-commerce, and can’t have a blog roll linking to websites that do, it’s pretty tough to see any benefits, other than to exercise your ego by emailing your blog about the cool things going on in your life. If I’m going to build up a site to include a lot of great (or at least interesting) information, I want to be able to do more with it than simply email it…my blog isn’t my penpal, it is my website.

So, you won’t be seeing much at Nick’s Car Blog for a while, as I take the time to switch it over to WordPress. It kind of suprises me WordPress doesn’t implement a “Post from Email” feature and completely squash Posterous, as it’s really the only unique feature Posterous contains. Perhaps I should have given Tumblr a shot, given its better array of features and customization, but I have a feeling I’d be left with the same impression: it’s no WordPress…

Photo Credit:  Photobucket

Part of what I’ve learned through SEO is the importance of relevancy – if you have a blog about SEO & tech (like this one) – you should keep your posts related to that topic. Not that you can’t have fun and post off-topic every once in a while – but you don’t want to be a schizophreniac and post on a different topic every time either…and this isn’t just for the sake of search engine relevancy – your readers subscribe to your blog because they are interested in X topic. If you start jabbering about Y topic too much, you’re going to turn off your readers who feel they were duped into reading a blog that wasn’t about what they thought.

With that in mind, I’m a HUGE car freak. I’ve found myself wanting to tweet and post about my modified Audi A4 and cars in general a lot – but my followers on twitter and my (very few) regular readers on this blog probably wouldn’t appreciate that or at least find it wierd.

I’ve also been wanting to try new platforms and I’ve heard a lot of people that are vocal fans of Posterous. Since I don’t want to put too much effort into a second blog (its hard enough updating this one 1x per week), Posterous seems like a good choice. Here’s how it works:

• There is no web form to post – you simply send an email to post@posterous.com with your latest post and it uploads within a few seconds. It even converts images to galleries, embeds videos, and does everything for you. Since I have a BlackBerry, I can pretty much post anywhere, at any time.
• It’s pretty common for posts to be short. I don’t need well thought-out articles or anything – I can basically say “oh look, a cool car [pic]” and that’s sufficient
• It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, etc. and can automatically feed into these streams when you post something new. I setup twitter.com/nickscarblog and it is updated whenever I post letting my followers know there is a new post to check out.
• It gives you 1 GB of free storage and is super easy to setup
• You can use your own domains

I registered my domain through GoDaddy using a Coupon Code I found on SlickDeals that gave me an awesome discount with free private registration, so this whole project set me back about $20 bucks for a 3 yr registration.

So if you’re interested in cars, or seeing a Posterous blog in action – go check it out at http://nickscarblog.com