Google has slapped many giants with its latest Pagerank update. But, it has surely turned out good for me. If you had been to my blog yesterday or the day before, you would have noticed that i have added an About page. To be specific, the Pageranks of all the sites that i have mentioned there have increased (or remained the same. but have not decreased). GotChance has become a PR5 blog and i’m very much happy with that. The pagerank’s of my other sites have increased as below :

• Templora - Did not change. Remained 4
• Clever Tutorials - Previous 1 - Now 4
• Kontactr - From 0 to 5
• VidSav - From 0 to 2
• Nitrogen Designs - Remained 4
• My Blog Contests - From 0 to 1

Let me know how this Pagerank update has affected your blogs. I’m planning to sell some links (of course, with rel=”nofollow”).

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This is the second post in my Comparison of Magazine Themes series. In this post, we’ll see about Block Magazine Theme and Revolution News Theme. I chose these two because they were so close in the layout and look.

Block Magazine

Block Magazine is a paid theme by Adii and is sold at UBD. magazine-style theme. After seeing themes like The Morning After and Revolution News themes, i have to say that there is nothing special in this theme. As in the Your Revolution theme, i don’t like the colors. Too flashy. I like the way the Recent Posts, Popular Posts and the Recent Comments are displayed. That saves good space. The “Welcome” block on the top right, sorta degrades the theme’s quality. I’m not going to go deep into discussing this theme. There is nothing special in this theme when compared to Adii’s nex Premium News theme. That is a really nice one.

Revolution News Theme

Revolution News theme is a paid magazine-style theme by the popular Wordpress themer Brian Gardner. This theme basically comes in three flavors : Magazine, News, Sports. But, all the three have a magazine-style layout. Each of them costs $100 with a single-domain license. I wouldn’t say the price is too high. But, it could have been better.
Coming on to the theme itself, the colors are very pleasant on the eyes. Very clean layout. I like all the three styles’ layout. The “Subscribe” button could have been made better. The category pages follow a layout similar to the homepage and looks nice. Nothing much to complain about in this theme and that too without using it.

Pros

• Good ad position
• Clean layout and colors
• Different styles available

Cons

• The price…
• The basic stylesheet (link style etc..) is kinda boring. Could have been more Web2.0-ish

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After so many reactions in the blogosphere, if WidgetBucks hadn’t reacted to it, they would have got slapped by the bloggers too. So, they made a pretty good decision today and updated their code. But, it is really funny the way they reacted. They don’t want their publishers to know the truth. I got this mail from them today :

One of the concerns we’ve heard from many of you has been the slow loading times of our widgets. We really appreciate your feedback and comments in helping us improve in this area. So, today we addressed this issue by rolling out new code that ultimately delivers faster loading widgets.

But, in reality if you check the new code, you’ll notice that everything remains the same. But, only the Text Link has been removed. But, still i’m in a dilemma whether to use WidgetBucks because even their new code contains “hidden text”. That is against Google as well. I don’t know what Google’s reaction might be to this move of WidgetBucks. But, i’m definitely going to wait for sometime before continuing to use WidgetBucks.

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Today, i read at Shoemoney’s blog that WidgetBucks have been penalized by Google. I tried it out myself and found it to be true. And furthermore, i used this tool to find out that they rank nowhere in the Top 1000 for both “widgetbucks” and “widgetbucks.com”. Try it out yourself. This is really not a good sign from Google. Contrary to what Shoemoney has mentioned, my opinion is that WidgetBucks have been removed (banned) from Google Index and not just penalized.

I did a little research on this and Widget Bucks are indeed disobeying Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you view the code that they provide you, you will notice that there is a very prominent text link present in it.
<a href="http://www.widgetbucks.com" target="_blank">WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com</a>
After looking at it, i understood that it is the Flash animation that rolls over this text-link and hides/covers it. The Flash is generated using the Javascript code. So, i used my Web Developer toolbar to disable javascript. Then, i viewed my site (that used WidgetBucks). As expected, i found the Text Link alone. Check it out :

This is a straightforward disobedience of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It clearly states as follows :

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

I’m not a SEO expert. But, my opinion (and most probably Google’s too) is that a Flash Animation rolling over a Text link is a form of Hidden Text link. And i don’t see any Positive motive behind such an act from WidgetBucks. So, its really better to stay away from them. I’m removing WidgetBucks from all the sites that i used them on. ShoppingAds seems a better alternative.

Whats your opinion about this ? Feel free to share your comments.

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This is the first post in my Comparison of Magazine Themes series. In this post, we’ll see about The Morning After and Your Revolution. I chose these two because they were so close in the layout and look.

The Morning After

The Morning After is a free magazine-like theme by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme. To my knowledge, it is the first magazine-style theme to be released(see below). Not only the first, it is my favorite. I use this personally on one of my sites and i’m loving this. This theme has many features that are essential for a magazine. Especially, i really appreciate the use of Custom Fields. I love the way the posts are displayed on the homepage, and the recent posts section. The Morning After doesn’t fall behind on the post display page also. It is very nice too like a professional magazine. If i wanted to choose a magazine-style theme and didn’t have money to spend, i’d definitely choose The Morning After. To look at an excellent implementation of The Morning After, go to PopSofa.com

Pros

• Excellent Layout
• Very good use of Custom Fields
• Integration with Email Posts Plugin (a typical magazine feature)

Cons

• Colorless. By default it is fully in grayscale

Your Revolution

First of all i’d like to tell that i have no personal vengeance against Adii and this post is truly unbiased. The first thing that stuck me when i saw Your Revolution was its color. It was too bright and was a heavy strain on my eye. Of course, i complained that The Morning After was colorless. But, i didn’t want this much color either. Anything like the Revolution News Theme will be optimal. Coming back to Your Revolution, i’d tell that it gives less emphasis for the posts on the frontpage. That is, the first and the second column on the frontpage are equally wide. But, its is logical that the first column needs to be wider than the second.

Your Revolution gives excellent position for the 300 x 250 advertisement, which was absent in The Morning After. Your Revolution’s single post page look impressive too. Though Your Revolution’s category page is nice, i like The Morning After’s better. Also, Your Revolution has a poor header design which is a big drawback. To conclude, i’d say that Your Revolution isn’t worth your bucks when The Morning After is available for free.

Pros

• Good Positioning for Advertisement

Cons

• The color scheme
• Poor header design
• The “Can-do-better” type of layout

UPDATE : Sorry to have mentioned that The Morning After was the first Magazine-style theme. Its looks like Mimbo Magazine theme was released before The Morning After. Sorry for the mistake. Thanks for letting me know Darren.

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Today, i received an email from Text-Link-Ads telling me about their new CPC Ad network called Shopping Ads. They linked me to shoppingads.com/tla and provided me with a Beta code too. I entered it eagerly and filled out the registration form. But it told me that the email address was already in use and that if i had an account at Auction Ads, i can login directly. So i logged in using those details and found that Shopping Ads is just another version (or perhaps another form of) of Auction Ads. The difference is that Auction Ads is just for eBay auctions, but Shopping Ads is for all general shops. It looks pretty nice and i might give it a try. Check out a demo ad here (RSS Readers might need to click-through to view the ad) :

I’ll try them out here on GotChance soon.
PS : I’m happy that i over took John Chow, Darren Rowse and Shoemoney in posting about Shopping Ads.

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Disclaimer : I’m not making this post because MyBlogContest.com is a direct competitor to my other blog MyBlogContests.com. This post is made just to discuss about placing too many ads.

First of all, we all know that there is a limit for everything and ad placements on a site has limits too (though it is the personal opinion of the owner). Check out MyBlogContest.com. Recently i visited the blog and was shocked by the number of ads just on their frontpage. Besides these, they also have a “Links” page and page full of “Coupons” and a “Make Money Online” page full referral links. So, monetizing the site has begun just on the first line of the site. Next on the header there is an Adsense Link Unit. And a Google Search box. Everyone know that Wordpress’s internal search facility is a lot better than Google’s site search. So the only motive for having this Search box is to make money.

Then, a set of 6 affiliate links. After that a 468 x 60 banner and a Google Text ads on the right (not seen on frontpage too). Now, lets see the sidebar. I’m not going to complain about the Featured Contests section. But, look at the other below it. Text-Link-Ads and then another bunch of Affiliate links under the title “Free Stuff” and a WidgetBucks ad box. I remember seeing a 250×250 Google Ad, which i think has been removed now.

Coming to the worser part, 50% of the central content area is full of ads. I’m not going to list them all here (a tedious job). But they include WidgetBucks, Google Adsense, Deal Dot Com etc… What is even worse is the Paid posts (or paid reviews). Being a Blog about “Blog Contests”, he should be writing about Blog Contests. But, his every alternate post is a review post to promote a product from Commision Junction. Also, i don’t know what “Finding a new home is UK (http://myblogcontest.com/finding-your-new-home-in-uk/)” and “Free Dating (http://myblogcontest.com/make-new-friends-at-friendsation/) has to do with Blog Contests.

To my knowledge, the number of Monetization Spots on their homepage were about 26 or 27 when i counted, excluding the top “Links”, “Coupons” and “Make Money Online” tabs. That exceeds the 21 ads on the No.1 Blog Engadget as pointed out by John Chow. So, what do you think about this ? If you are visitor, will you stay on the site after seeing so many ads ? If you ask me, i would, but only if there was quality content. On his blog, even Content is adulterated with Review posts. So, i’d just stay away.

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