U.S. judge in Google case sides with gov’t in part If you’ve seen this story or another one similar to it, you might be as disgusted as I am at the lenghts my American government will go to trample the civil liberties of its citizens. The government has no right to invade the privacy of its citizens in this manner no matter how good the cause.

If I’m disgusted at the government, I’m even more disgusted at the judges that are allowing this to happen. The job of a judge is to protect the american people from both its citizens and its government. It is a bad day indeed when the judges start choosing the government over the first ammendment.

Of course this isn’t completely the government’s fault. I am proud of Google for not bending over backwards when the real G demanded the info, but they should do anything to keep the search data out of the G’s hands. If the judges will not protect us then Google should. Destroy the search data Google, take one for the American people. You can always rebuild, we can’t without a long and bloody war.

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I am proud to say that I have already met my Adsense goal for this month. I changed up the implementation of the ads on some of my sites and it has just about tripled my earnings from them. So I can pretty much call another goal that I have. It looks like I will get my first payout from Adsense at the end of this month. I’ve been using Adsense since August of last year and I never was really sure that i’d make it to the first payout, but I am going to.

So, I have a new goal for next month. That is to make a payout in one month. So I want to Average $3.33 per day for the entire month for a grand total of $100. So how am I going to do this? Well I’ve got one site that did very well when it was getting steady traffic from its previous owner, but that has tappered off. So I’m going to try to get it some decent traffic. I I do that then its earnings should sky rocket because it has a high click-thru rate and it pays well for clicks. Secondly I’m going to work on acquiring another already earning site or two.

In other interesting news, bring on Google Mars! If they’re already doing this with the limited info they have, I can’t wait to see it once they have a satellite sitting on mars.

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The next time that Google makes an earth shattering announcement on their blog, do your self a favor. When you spread the word by blogging about it, include a link back to Google’s blog post. What this will do is when Google next crawls your site they will find your link to that post, and they will add a link to your blog under thier “links to this post” section of their earth-shattering announcement post.

Now, not only is this going to get you traffic—maybe a lot maybe only a little—but, as far as I can tell, these links will pass PR as well. I just picked a random post from April of 2004 and it has a PR5. How’s that for a free high PR backlink? To get more traffic then pick a really good title for your post which is sure entice readers that are looking for speculation and answers ect.

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p>All I can say is that this month has started out great for me. Today is the first day that I have ever made over $5.00 in a single day. Most of it was from Adsense, but even though I’ve been critical of Chitika in the past, it is starting to pick up for me. My Adsense goal for this month was to finally make over $1 per month. Well, after two days not only am I above that goal, if things continue at this rate then I will have doubled in this month what I have earned to date.

This inspires me to say that succeeding with Adsense really is all about the placement. On two of my sites I completely changed the Adsense implementation and they are doing 1000 times better at making money while there has been no significant change in traffic. And unlike previous times, CPC is staying strong.

I’m still waiting and hoping for a PR update on the index of Mlinkz. If it doesn’t get it before the update is finalized then I am going to really begin to wonder.

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I’m going to go on record and say that yesterday was a pretty darn good day. I had to make a hard decision and so far it has panned out. Plus, Google was good to me as well.

Let’s start with the hard decision. Since starting this semester at school I have known that there was no way for me to keep running Mlinkz directory if it kept getting the number of submissions that it was getting each day. So I was faced with a hard decision. I could either sell it, my only really successful site, and start over with something new or I could tack on a fee of some sort so that submissions would be slashed. I fully intended to sell it after the PR update because I expected the homepage to go to PR5 and the category indexes to go to PR4. However, Google didn’t do what I was waiting for, so I opted for the second option. Yesterday morning I decided to charge a reviewing fee for submission to the directory. I also doubled the price of the featured links and I told myself that I was happy with a single site submission each day. Yesterday I sold no regular submissions, but I did sale two featured links!

I said that Google was good to me. Well it was. After waiting the entire duration of this PR update for something to happen to Mlinkz, yesterday the category pages that were linked to from the index finally got some PR. PR3s all around. I’m still waiting on the main page to get updated, but for not it is not as important as the category page.

Secondly, February has ended, so lets discuss how I did at Adsense. My goal for the month was $1 each day for a total of $28. All was going good and I was well ahead schedule until I had a dry spell in mid-February. Well yesterday I had an excellent adsense day and fell just $.40 short of my monthly goal. So this month I’m going to possibly aquire another site and really make the $1 per day for a total of $31 at the end of the month. If I can accomplish that then I will be only one month away from earning an adsense payout, something that I was never really sure I would make it to.

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The Official Google blog has made a post about their payment processor that they will release at some point in the future. Although vague, there are a couple conclusions that we can draw from the post.

First of all, we can conclude that its not too terribly far off. Possibly even eminant. However, there are two ways of looking at it. Either this blog post was hinting that it will be released very soon, or it was a tease—just trying to get us hyped up over it. Either way it is probably a good strategy.

Finally, I’m going to guess from their description of what it will do, that its not going to do everything that many are hoping it will do. Many, webmasters especially, are already hailing it as a the payment processor that will kill Paypal—a permanent fix to all the evils of paypal’s transaction charges. However, since none of this functionality was mentioned, it suggests to me that Google isn’t interested in moving into that market, and so won’t include those features. If you’ve noticed, the only toes that Google has ever stepped on are those of the US government, and other search engines.

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Well, I’ve gone just about as long as I dare to go without mentioning the pagerank update that we are in the middle of. Let’s just say that its obvious that its not going the way it is supposed to. Either Google has made major changes to their algorithm and they’re in the middle of playing with it, or they’ve broken something and are trying to fix it.

Google has been dancing for more than a month now, but before Saturday it was dancing to Jagger’s tune. On Saturday it started showing new results for *some* sites. This has left many webmasters disappointed because it seems that for the most part only new sites or sites that previously had no pr are gaining anything. This is especially frustrating to the many webmasters who have put many hours into improving pr since the last update.

Some of the webmasters who have sites that have attained pr’s that they like will try to tell you that pr doesn’t really matter and that you are better off worrying about other things, but theirs no real doubt that pr does add value to your websites, plus it is a nice indication of how you are doing.

If the update is finalized the way things are showing right now: MLinkz would stay a 3, Proxert would remain a 0, MasterTheWeb would become a 2, StudentProxy would be a 4, and Display-Ip would become a 3. These results, if finalized, will completely disapoint me. I fully expect Mlinkz, Proxert, and StudentProxy to be 5s, and I expected MasterTheWeb and Display-Ip to be 4s. However, although this is completely inconclusive and just a general observation, my Adsense revenue has actually gone up since the PR dance started on Saturday.

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Elursrebmem-v7ndotcom is reporting in an interesting article—that includes an interview with John Scott and some reported “insider info” from anonymous Google sources—that the TBPR export, that has been long awaited and long overdue, is being held off because of v7n’s SEO contest.

The insider states that Google is using the delay to study the way that SEO’s are working and that is what “Big Daddy” is really all about. He says that the idea for “Big Daddy” came from “Big Brother”. How’s that for privacy?

It may or may not be true, but if Google can be this fickle and actually uses their search engine technology to spy on people, it might be time for Google to fall off their pedestal.

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I’ve been posting to MasterTheWeb for a month and a half now. But up until this point I have never made a single cent from this website. Until yesterday, that is, when I got my first adsense click from here. It was a small amount, certainly nothing to call home about, but I’ve been wondering for a while now why I wasn’t getting any clicks. Well I’ve finally got one and I hope this is the start of many more to come.

Another thing that I want to address is the apparent almost complete shutdown of Adsense on the weekends. I didn’t make anything on Saturday or Sunday or Monday and almost nothing Tuesday—despite having almost a combined 1000 impressions between them—and I only made $.40 yesterday, but I awoke early this morning to $1.25 already for today. Certainly I enjoy these times when I get good paying clicks within a small amount of time and early in the day, but it doesn’t always extend into latter in the day, which is always a little disapointing. This leads me to another interesting observation. Looking at my adsense logs, almost half of my earnings this month have come from clicks on Thursdays.

In other news, due to the poor performance of my Ads over the weekend I’ve fallen below my desired average of $1 per day for this month. Also, I applied and was rejected from BannerConnect.net. They looked promising, but I gave a very conservative estimate of how many impressions I could serve each month on the application and I was blankly rejected because I hadn’t put enough. This annoys me severely because I know that the site I was applying for gets well over 100,000 page views, and should therefore have 100,000 impressions per day. But I’m a realist, I know that it doesn’t actually get that many ad impressions because no program I’ve tried has been able to deliver that many. The most disapointing thing of all of this is that I still haven’t been able to monetize this site(and another like it) that I’m getting so much traffic to because no very good advertising program(Adsense and YPN don’t allow their ads on these sites) will accept it despite there being nothing really wrong with the content. There is only a perceived/opinionated/close-minded way of rejecting it and all the ad networks I’ve contacted are looking through these close-minded goggles.

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Welcome to the newest category on MasterTheWeb: Contests! From time to time people have cool contest for webmasters so we might as well spread the love.

Here’s the first contest that I’ve found (description copied straight from website).

Make a blog post and win $250

BlogParty is a new network of sites that help leverage your blog, but we need help getting the message out there. How about some motivation? How about the chance to win $250 for writting an entry in your blog about BlogParty with a link back to www.blogparty.net?

Easy enough?
First, make a post to your blog about BlogParty with a link back to www.BlogParty.net. Verbose or short - sweet or critical - wordy or terse - it makes no difference - it is your blog and you post with your normal style. Only one entry per blog! However, as many entries as you have blogs - as long as it is only one entry per blog.

Second, go to the Blog Party Blog and enter your post’s PermaLink with your email at. Don’t forget to opt-in to the BlogParty newsletter here on this page.- Of course you are not obligated, but heck - we are here to help you and your blog, so why not?

Third, wait till March 15, 2006. On that date, we will select ONE blog that still has the link active and that we are able to contact via email (If you give us a bad email - how are we going to let you know you won??). The selected blog’s owner will be the winner of $250 paid via PayPal.

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