Overhaulin
I plan on expanding this blog into a full website within the next few days so I can have room to host projects like the cloaker I've mentioned in previous posts as well as other stuff. This blog format is just too narrow and I want to have room for other areas of interest sooo, big update and a new look coming soon.
You may see a drop in Google Referrals
According to the AdSense blog, Google is currently going through a validation process to make sure referrals are all valid. I haven't noticed a drop in referrals myself, but if you have, this may be why.
We're always working on new ways for you to get quality ad inventory, as well as developing safeguards to ensure that the conversions generated on publisher sites are valid. As you may know, referral ads are paid on a conversion basis; a conversion is considered a specific action defined by the advertiser. That action might be a sale, a clickthrough to a specific page on an advertiser site, or an online sign-up for a promotion.
We've recently made a change to help make sure that the conversions generated by referral ads are valid. For some publishers who display referrals for non-Google products, the earnings you receive for the ad may now be less than the maximum referral value displayed for that ad. This is because our system will initially place a restriction on referral earnings as we monitor click and conversion data to determine that the conversions generated are valid. Once this validation period ends, you'll begin earning the maximum value of the conversions as displayed in your account.
We can't say precisely how long the validation period will last, but will make every effort to ensure that it's as speedy as possible. It will vary by publisher since site activity is different for everyone, and we anticipate that the majority of you will be minimally affected. However, advertisers will only be charged the maximum referral value once a publisher has completed the validation period.
Our goal with this change is to ensure the long-term effectiveness of the referrals program for both publishers and advertisers. By increasing the value and quality of the referral network, we believe we'll attract more advertisers and provide more opportunities for you to earn.
BlogRush - The Mighty “Phase 2″
BlogRush is about to implement a ton of changes and they're not even a month old. It's nice to see such quick action to make improvements, I know they really got slammed when they first came out since every other blogger posted an announcement with their referral links trying to get a leg up on the referrals (nothing wrong with that!). You can read about the improvements on John Reese's blog. A few of the big ones are copied below.
- Per Post Statistics & Addition Of “Buzz Meter”
Now you’ll be able to see how many times each of your posts is syndicated across the network and how many people clicked to read that individual post.
- Bonus Syndication For All Users, But Weighted Towards Low-Traffic Members
All members of our network will be receiving bonus syndication but we’ll be giving more bonus credits to our members that need it most — ones with low-traffic.
- Improved Security & Abuse Measures (We’ve already squashed 95% of the cheaters!)
We’ll be rolling out improved security measures, but we’re happy to report that we’ve eliminated about 95% of the cheaters in our network. We’re sure to continue to get a few new ones ‘trying’ from time to time, but we’ll work hard to zap them as quickly as possible.
- 100% Manual Review & New Quality Guidelines
We’ve already launched our Manual Review process… all new users as of today (and for good) will have their blogs manually reviewed BEFORE the widget will even load on their pages. Their posts will not be syndicated across the network until they are APPROVED and meet our Quality Guidelines. If they are not approved the widget will not load on their pages and none of their content will ever be syndicated on the network.
We’re almost finished with manually reviewing all the existing blogs in our network. We should be done with this massive ‘audit’ within about 7 days.
As soon as we complete this full audit there will be a MAJOR SWEEP of our entire network. All the blogs that don’t meet our quality criteria will be REMOVED from our network.
Say goodbye to all the non-English blogs, junk blogs, and any low-quality blogs you may have seen from time-to-time in the widget. (I love this one)
Can you turn your marketing campaigns on a dime?
Many people who do affiliate marketing focus on niche subjects, create their landing pages, and start selling. Most marketers have more than one site; dozens or even hundreds of sites. But, for the average person starting out, you only need a small handful in order to adapt quickly to changing trends and turn on a dime. The trick is making sure they're the right kinds of sites.
Forget about thinking of things in terms of subject or niche; its all about he demographics. You might have several websites on an array of subjects such as cars, phones and online poker. The problem with approaching sites by subject only is that they tend to overlap the same demographic and you could be wasting your time*. You can successfully market products that are unrelated to your website by focusing on the target demographic.
Below is a very simple chart of consumer demographics. This only covers sex and age to keep things simple. There are of course subsets of demographics that could be drawn in here such as race and religion, but I'm keeping it simple for illustrative purposes. The men are in blue and women in pink.
Going back to the example websites of cars, phones and poker, look at the graphic and see who you think those types of sites would target. They would generally be younger males. If you're creating websites for the purpose of affiliate marketing, you should consider every group represented in the graphic. If you do this, you'll be able to react quicker to trends and new products while not having to waste time on multiple sites that overlap the same demographics.
Let's say, for example, Apple plans on releasing a hot new product in a few weeks and you want to cash in on it. They're releasing the Apple iHearingAid and the senior citizen community is buzzing with excitement about it. Do any of your sites target senior citizens? If you used the graphic above as a guide when creating your websites, you'll be ready to cash in on the new trend. If you have to make websites as new products pop up, you'll be one step behind.
*There's nothing wrong with creating sites that overlap demographics if they're things you're truly interested in or because you want to create authority sites on specific subjects. For the purpose of marketing, though, it can be a waste of time for beginners.
Possible Google PR update soon
For those of you who still care about page rank, there's a lot of speculation of a page rank update coming soon. There's a link in the article to this Digital Point thread where a lot of people are seeing their backlinks disappear. I've noticed this too lately. One of my PR4 sites had a couple hundred backlinks last I checked and now it's down to 1. The traffic hasn't changed though so I'm not worried about it.
My previous post mentioned app killers and I read another article today title "Where's the Apple iKiller?" This "<app name> killer" linkbait is starting to get old. :\
Killers on the loose
I've been reading a lot lately about how <hot new app> is the <hot old app> killer. Yahoo has tied together some of the features of its recent acquisitions to create a new and improved search. It may become more popular than the old Yahoo, but it's not a Google killer. There is also a new site called Fav.or.it. It's sort of a mashup of feeds, comments and user blogging under subdomains and Techcrunch is asking if it could be a Digg killer. Will Fav.or.it be a Digg killer? Probably not, but what do I know? Digg is so entrenched, I don't think they'll go down that easily.
By the way Fav.or.it is accepting blog submissions to be aggregated by them when they launch. The first 1000 blogs to be submitted in 10 Technorati ranking will be entered so hurry up if you want to get in. 
Dynamic bot identification with PHP
I've previously mentioned that I plan on posting some of my SEO software here and one of those is a cloaker that I'm still putting the finishing touches on. One thing I'll be adding into it is this snippet I came across on the syndk8 forums. With it you can identify bots or SE people dynamically and keep your own IP lists up to date.
function isBotDNS($ip)
{
$data=explode("rn",file_get_contents("./bad_host.txt"));
$revDNS=gethostbyaddr($ip);
for($i=0; $i<sizeof($data); $i++)
{
if(stristr($revDNS,$data[$i])!==FALSE)
{
return(true);
}
}
return(false);
}
bad_hosts.txt
google yahoo altavista akamai inktomi .bot bot. crawl. .crawl .live. microsoft msn. .ask. ask.com yahoo.net
As far as the cloaker goes, I'm not promoting it or making a big deal because I'm sure it will have a bug or few in the beginning, plus it will be free so I don't have a whole lot to gain by promoting it. It may not be the best out there, but it will be free and open source so hopefully others will help improve on it since school is keeping me busy. Some of the features include templates that are 100% customizable including the use of static keywords, custom keyword & link densities, several caching methods(cache by individual SE, show all SEs the same content, or cache for all visitors including SEs), customizable links(you have complete control over how your links will look), and htaccess support. When I say cache for all visitors, the cloaker really acts as a content generator. With the templating system I made, you can put in a little extra effort and the cloaker will make a virtually unlimited amount of readable, unique pages so there really isn't a need for IP delivery if you go this route.
These are just the things I can remember off the top of my head; I haven't worked on the cloaker in a couple weeks. BTW, the cloaker was actually completed about 2 years ago and I've used it with great results on several sites. What I've been doing is going through it line-by-line rewriting everything using OOP so it's easier to modify and extend. The original version was condensed into a couple files when I thought I might sell it. Now that I've been rewriting it, the code is much cleaner and will be easier for people to modify.
I'll go into more detail about the cloaker in the future.
Google testing fresh content searching
Domain age and page rank may become less relevant to some if Google's time-specific search becomes popular. It lets you narrow search results by age. Instead of getting the same old search results every time, you can specify how fresh you want the content to be. This is something I would like to see become popular alongside the current method because searching for current events will no longer give me a bunch of irrelevant sites. Of course the old method of searching won't be going anywhere since information doesn't have to be new to be relevant, but having the option is definitely nice. It may also create a new niche of fresh content by people whose blogs are too new to get Se traffic the old way.
Do follow, don’t follow
Nofollow tags have been popping up a lot as a discussion topic lately. A guest poster at Shoemoney talks about how it's good to use nofollow tags internally to improve SEO for your site. At the same time, many bloggers, like Randa Clay 
point out that the nofollow attribute discourages participation in blogs. This all seems like a complete 180 from the way people thought about the nofollow tag when it came out. Anyway, I removed the tag from the comments section of this blog because it's never served a real purpose to me. I have other blogs with the nofollow tag in place that still get spammed out to wazoo. All things being equal, I'd rather share the link juice with contributors than to clam up just to discourage spamming which will always happen anyway.
Spammers will love Google video email alerts
I just read on Search Engine Journal that Google Alerts has added video alerts to their list of alert types. This will undoubtedly increase the number of videos being uploaded with fake titles and keyword-laden word salads for descriptions so certain videos will show up no matter what keywords are being searched for or entered as alert search terms. And it's not just Google videos:
Alerts for new videos related to the user’s specified topic are culled from various video uploading sites such as Google video, YouTube and other video uploading sites.
I won't be taking advantage of these alerts myself, but it would definitely be easy to upload video clips, enter a bunch of keywords for whatever the hot topic of the week is in the description along with your links at the top, of course, and then let Google do the foot-work by sending an alert out to thousands of people for you.