I have never been much satisfied with Adsense for celebrity sites anyways. Since last 5-6 months Google Adsense has been paying a cent or two for every click i get on my celebrity sites network. Believe me, i have lot of traffic on those sites and i really do get lot of clicks there. An average 100 clicks give me $2.00 only. I mean, this really is insane. Isn’t it? Is that what the advertisers at adwords are really paying for celebrity sites? I feel totally looted here!

Anyways, recently i was browsing my Adsense account and there in those green highlighted pointers it was written that verifying your website via Google Webmaster Tools will help us serve you better. Well, i thought this is it. Much targeted ads, much more money and much better revenue for the celebrity sites. So i readily added and verified all my celebrity websites. So what do you think? Problem solved? Am i earning more now?

Lol Not really. It’s even worse! Now an average 100 clicks give me $0.50 to $0.75. There you are Google Adsense. You really are brilliant with getting much more targeted ads.

My Dear God. Who in the world pays less than 1 cent per click to any advertiser program in the whole wide world?

I checked the ads running on my sites. Just reading the url and opening them in new windows. Each and every site is Made for Adsense (MFA). And they look worse. With absolutely no content. For God sake even blogspot blogs are being advertised by Adsense! Where is the Google TOS of “good landing page” being applied? I just want to ask, why is Google so dumb with their advertisers? And yet they come out brave and merciless when it comes to paid advertising on other sites which we have, by deindexing and banning and PR ripping things. What is it with you Google? Why don’t you get a life? Why can’t you live your own life and let live others their own?

Fact is, Google won’t let you sell advertising on your sites and blah blah blah, because they want people to use Adsense instead. But hey, they will not let you earn with Adsense either. Because they can’t filter MFA’s from their advertiser program.

So there you have it. Google Adsense vs. Celebrity Sites. You clearly know who the winner is! Don’t ruin your life. Get some better publisher advertisement programs on your celebrity sites.

Alright, so there is another Google Pagerank update. And guess what? Like we all thought, it’s a crap pagerank update again. Nothing has changed with Google’s attitude.

I am a strong believer that Google is the best search engine on the web. It also has some great webmaster tools and great communities, recreation sites and advertising programs like Orkut, YouTube and Adsense. But when it comes to Pagerank, well, they suck big time. I think this is how they prove that “No One Is Perfect”. They wanted something terribly wrong with their system, and they have pagerank for that task.

I m more disappointed with the way Google treats directories. I have one major directory which has 525,000 inlinks in Yahoo siteexplorer and nearly 1700 backlinks in Google! Awful comparision but still… I got PR3 on that directory of mine, although it was PR5 in the very second update. The PR dropped that time and seems it won’t go up again. It’s a directory alright, and i do provide listings to other websites as every directory should do, even Google Directory and DMOZ directory, for that matter, does. But the fact is that i have never SOLD any links on homepage or inside pages, ever, despite getting thousands request from advertisers every month. Still Google is treating that as paid links. I think the guys behind pagerank have lost good portion of brains. And i do believe that these guys will go beyond every limit to prove how big dumb ass they are. It’s even more disappointing to see that some new directories, with default templates, and useless names, with couple of hundred backlinks get PR5 or PR6. Arggghhh… Come on Google PR guys. Get some life. At least clear up your basics. Damn, what a waste.

These days i am just trying to buy links for traffic… Followed or no followed…i am just concentrating on traffic. But Google spoils my day everytime there is a pagerank update. Looks like all efforts down the drain.

Disappointed, Depressed and Tired of Google Pagerank i also opened a thread in some of the webmaster forums. I get almost the same response from 90 percent of webmasters. After a pretty long discussion and thinking on PageRank system, i have analyzed that either Google Pagerank should soon be reviewed by Google Team and things shall back to normal or else Google is going to lose faith of many webmasters as far as PR is concerned.

All said, i still believe that Google Directory does not deserve the PR8 it has. Come On Google, you are just a copycat when it comes to directory. Using DMOZ Database in normal term does mean that you are copying it’s efforts and content. At least we directory owners do have our own unique content on directories. So stop the injustice and do something for which webmaster’s get a little easy life…comparatively.

Christmas is just around the corner. Shopping and decorations have already started. So why should webmasters stay behind. All are decorating their homes and i guess webmasters would like to decorate their websites and weblogs as well. With this thought in mind i started searching the web to find out some good wordpress themes for the festive season. Then i thought why not collect all the popular themes we have for the season. So here are some of the popular wordpress themes for Christmas.

Christmas Days : It is one of the my favorites among the Christmas themes. It’s a two column wordpress theme named “Christmas Days”. It is designed and distributed free by Design Disease. It’s coded for the latest version of wordpress and thus support the “tags” feature. It’s also a widget ready theme. Another good feature of the theme is that there is space in sidebar for your Flickr photos. You will have to use Flickr plugin with this theme, but the feature add lot of grace to your blog. The color combination is great and goes well with the mood of Christmas. This is one theme that you should definitely have on your blog, at least this Christmas. Visit Author’s Page - Download Link.

Hot Screensaver’s Christmas Theme : While writing this post, i searched for more themes on net. And this new theme came up after much searching. And i am glad i found it. This theme really rings the bell this Christmas. I will put it right in the best free wordpress themes available this season for Christmas. Do checkout the theme. Full credits to the designer. Gosh, they went in so much detail, even the “Submit Comment” button is designed for Christmas. I guess this one is perfect for Christmas. It is designed by Hot-Screensaver. A three column theme with two right sidebars. Widget and tags supported. Striking features includes easy change of header image via wp-admin and pretty nice adsense or any other publisher ads integration. Yup, adsense ready theme. I have made up my mind. I’m going to use this theme for Christmas on few of my blogs. You can visit Author’s Page - Download Link.

Christmas Gift Wordpress Theme : It’s a great looking wordpress theme for Christmas. The header part is very well designed. The first look at it will tell you that’s it’s Christmas in the air. The rest of the theme is sweet and simple. It’s a three column theme with a left sidebar and a right sidebar. The Christmas Gift theme has been designed by Rahmat Blog. The heading parts for categories, blogrolls etc. has been well designed as well. Theme is compatible with latest version of wordpress. Also it is CSS and XHTML valid. It is widget ready theme. I would say that overall it is a very good theme. For more details and live demo you can visit Author’s Page.

Merry Christmas Wordpress Theme : Ahh! Finally a dark colored theme. 1 Column theme, literally.I mean there are no sidebars etc, just a footer bar as one can call it. It’s a dark colored theme. Probably one can say that the theme depicts the Christmas night. What matters more is that there is Santa Claus, there is moon and there are colors in this theme. The theme is well designed. It’s a good looking theme with different concept than the other themes that i have listed. Propbably that’s the reason i chose it in this list. I have no info if the theme is widget ready or if support tags feature of wordpress as the author didn’t mention that on his blog. You can visit Author’s page for download links and demo.

I just came across these quality themes till now. If you know about more themes that are free, for wordpress and are quality themes, then please let me know and i will add them to the list. Until then, enjoy the themes and Christmas shoppings

Recently, WidgetBucks announced that they will only be entertaining US and Canadian traffic for clicks etc as they thought they are the only customers who will likely buy a product from their advertisers. At that moment it looked an end for WidgetBucks as far as the international traffic was concerned. The only alternative that was left was to geo-target your websites. Geo-Targetting would have been lot of pain for some website owners. On my side, i stopped using WidgetBucks simply because i didn’t had any website which only targeted US and Canadian citizens. But i guess all are troubles are over with the very recent development by WidgetBucks or in more general by Mpire Corporation.

Today, WidgetBucks launched it’s new International CPM ads that would be included in our widgets itself. It’s basically a CPM ads for non US/Canada traffic. Of course this is going to help publishers in a big way, specially those who have blend of traffic from many different countries. The new CPM ads will give you revenue per impressions, for the site visitors. There system will itself Geo-target the ads for you. For example, if your site visitor comes from US or Canada, the widget will display the normal pay per click program. However if the visitors are from other countries, the widget will display ads which pays per impressions. This is going to be great. I recommend you to join WidgetBucks today. The future seems bright.

By the way, just for your information. You will need to recopy your widgets code in order to make the widget work as mentioned here. Once you have the new code on your site, WidgetBucks’ system will itself take care of rest of things. Frankly, WidgetBucks is back on many of my sites. If you still haven’t signed up with them, well i recommend you to sign up instantly and enjoy the benefits. You can visit WidgetBucks here.

AGLOCO “Own The Internet”

You may have seen it’s banner somewhere on my blog till few days back. Official news is that AGLOCO is dead. We’re done with AGLOCO. The only reason i know of is that they did not have enough left to support AGLOCO’s operating costs. According to email sent to all AGLOCO’S memebers, they were using their savings to fund the operations. And now since they cannot use their savings anymore, it’s an end for a very unique concept by AGLOCO.

I’ll have to agree with John Chow. He says that AGLOCO was a good idea that was poorly executed. Yes, that the bottomline. R.I.P. AGLOCO.

Update: (December 13, 2007)

I just received the mail from AGLOCO’s team. Here is a copy of it:

Dear Sharat,

We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO’s operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at *email not displayed* .

We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.

AGLOCO Development Team

Well, after carefully going thorugh the mail, i think the intentions are clear. AGLOCO’s team has no intentions to end AGLOCO. They are going to carry on operations if they could find some supporter or sponsor. So basically, it all comes down to finance. Hopefully, they will get someone to keep AGLOCO on the move!