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!

Well, this has been a week with some important news and updates. I won’t go in each and every detail, but just few tits and bits.

• Google continues to play childish. It again strikes directories and paid links sites. Many inner pages of directories went down to PR0 or a gray bar. Some unlucky directories even got PR0 on their homepage. Yeah, i know how disgusting this is. But anyways, we just found one more reason to say “Goodbye Google Pagerank“.
• Larry Page, The co-founder of Google Inc has decided to tie a knot with his girlfriend next month. Larry and Lucy Southworth, his girlfriend, will get married on 8th of December’07. The location is still undisclosed. Larry is one of the world’s wealthiest man. As a matter of fact, he is the Silicon Valley’s richest bachelor with a fortune worth about $20 billion. Well, the couple will definitely be showered with all webmaster’s blessing… even from web directory owners..
• India won the Indian Oil Cup in cricket. It was a 5 match series against cricket rivals Pakistan. They clinched the series 3-2 and very convincingly. All of a sudden, Indian cricket looks promising with likes of Mahindra Singh Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir. Well, i wish them more success in the future.
• Matt Hulett, WidgetBucks‘ CEO announced that traffic from outside US and Canada (which they term as “International Traffic”) is unlikely to buy from a U.S merchant website because of various obvious reasons. This resulted in dropped RPC (Rate Per Click). From now on, merchants will not pay for the clicks from International Traffic and neither will the publishers get credits for any clicks coming from the same traffic. So best way out is to implement a geo-based ad placement service to determine when to display a WidgetBucks ad widget and when to display other advertising options. This new announcement however does not effect the Ocyober and first half of November earnings, by the way.
• Wordpress 2.3 (The latest version) was a nightmare for many wordpress powered blog owners. Specially for the ones who upgraded their blog from previous wordpress versions. The new version has many new and exciting features. The built in tag option is an excellent feature. But problems came when the blog were upgraded from 2.2.x version to 2.3 version. Everything in admin panel stopped working. All one could see were bugs and lot of errors. Many wordpress plugins proved to be incompatible with this new version. Some even faced problems with the themes they were using. Well, a solution would be out soon, like probably a Wordpress 2.3.1 or something. But if you’re upgrading your blog’s wordpress version, you better be taking backups before doing so.
• From the Formula One corner, well Fernando Alonso quit McLaren couple of weeks back. The news i last heard was that his former partner, Renault, are trying hard to convince Alonso to join them, once again. Other than Renault, there are good amount of talks going on between Alonso and Red Bull as well. Fernando Alonso hasn’t decided anything yet. It’s just a matter of time. I think he will go with Renault, with whom he won the 2005 and 2006 Drivers’ titles.

On my end…well i am thinking about dropping my idea on “Google Friendly Web Directory“. My “FREE” directory lost all it’s PR and finally came down to PR0. Remember, it’s a free directory and not a paid link selling directory. The Google’s PageRank algorithms and the kiddish behavior on paid links sucks big time. So there is no point making a blah blah friendly directory.

That’s all this week. I hope the forthcoming weeks have something good in store for me…. and us!

No it’s not that Google is ending it’s PageRank system. Rather it is the webmaster community that is ending the PageRank system. Today morning, the first thing i did was to remove Google toolbar from my Firefox browser. Also, from now onwards i would support Firefox without Google toolbar. This is being done, so that we all webmasters can enjoy our life. I would never want to see that green bar again in my life. So yes, it’s a goodbye to Google’s pagerank. And i am happy about it.

Google’s new pagerank algorithm has been pathetic. Their new algorithms against paid links and web directories has been disgusting. Their assault on web directories ain’t ending yet. Yesterday, i saw another PR Downgrade. Again on directories. Well, that was enough to spoil my morning. Now i have decided, that i won’t let Google rule my life. I will continue to do hard work on my directories and other site with paid links. That’s my business. That’s how i make my living. And i am not going to let any Google pagerank crap to stop me from making my living.

Advice for my fellow webmasters: Everyone has been effected in one way or the other by the Pagerank system. I have taken a wise step today, by removing that green bar. There are other ways to judge the sites as well and i am going to do just that from now on. I think it’s high time that we stop trusting on Pagerank system and start believing on our own quality of judgment. Say Goodbye to Google Pagerank!!!!

Search Engine Optimization is every webmaster’s dream. To be a successful webmaster, one needs to have successful websites. And to have successful websites, you needs to empower your search engine optimization skills.

The fact is, that Search Engine Optimization is the only way out to achieve better Search Engine rankings. If you think you know SEO basics as well as anything, you might be badly mistaken. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, work day in and day out to improve their algorithms, so as to give better rankings and results. So the SEO techniques keep on changing very frequently. All we need to know are the very basics of optimization to help us keep up with the ever changing trends of the search engines.

Keeping that in mind, i was searching for the various ebooks and information on SEO. And my search ended at Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. Aaron Wall, as many must be knowing, is a big name in SEO industry. His work, achievements and experience earned him a lot of name, fame and respect in the webmaster’s world.

Aaron Wall, launched SEO Book in 1994, wherein he shares his knowledge, experience and techniques. His “to the point” guidance has helped many young and old webmasters. Since 1994, about 10,000 professionals have learned Search Engine Optimization, just by reading The SEO Book. The result has been unanimous. Each and every professional, who has read this ebook and implemented the SEO techniques has found a new and a better life. They all witnessed much better web visibility for their websites.

The SEO Book is a 328 page, instantly downloadable ebook, which comes for a price tag of $79. Considering the quality and importance of information that SEO Book contains, i think $79 is just a very small amount. The benefits if thought of, can be many thousand times compared to what you pay. The ebook is written in a very simple english. The techniques are well classified in chapters. So even if you are an independent web professional or a first time webmaster, it will still be that easy for you to become an SEO expert.

Now this is supposed to be the best SEO guide on web right now. I am already in. What about you? Still thinking?

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