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If you've been around the Web for a while then you're probably like me and think that it doesn't really matter whether you use upper case or lower case for the search terms that you might type into Google. You might even think that it doesn't really matter about the case of the keywords that you're targeting either and Google will return the same search engine results pages for 'rated hot' as it will for 'Rated Hot'.

And of course, if you really had any doubts you could always head over Google's web search help center and get the word straight from the horse's mouth. If you did that you would discover that Google is quite plain about case sensitive search ... it's not an issue ... 'Google searches are NOT case sensitive.' ... and the emphasis was Google's and not mine.

But of course, if you've been a webmaster for any real length of time you would know that you can't always rely on Google to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In this particular situation maybe they've just been a bit slow in updating the web search help center ... or maybe they haven't yet noticed that search on Google is becoming case sensitive ... or maybe somebody hasn't read the memo ... but whatever the situation might be, the fact is that search on Google is becoming case sensitive.

That means that if you search for 'rated hot' the search engine results pages are quite likely to be a little different to what they would be if you had searched for 'Rated Hot'. In fact some people are reporting the search engine results pages can quite different with some sites that are listed for one version of the search term disappearing off the first page completely and being replaced by others when you search for the other version of the search term.

It seems that the changes were first noticed for searches done on Google's United Kingdom data center but now searches done in the United States are beginning to throw up some differences based on whether what you type into the search box is case sensitive or not. It's not something that I've been able to replicate here in Australia just yet but if it does come here then it's going to make life interesting for us.

Whether or not you need to worry too much about it is something may well depend on what you're doing online. From my point of view I think that it's unlikely that anyone who is searching online for a porn related term is going to use upper case letters at the start of each word in the search term. Even if they're searching for a particular name of a person, place or thing the chances of them using upper case letters at the start of each word is not all that high.

However, if you're working in mainstream them Google's latest move could be quite important and it's likely that some people are really going to be striving to capture good placement for a term whether the searcher enters the term in lower case or a mixture of upper and lower case letters. And that's where the fun could begin as some people start butchering the text on their pages and end up with something that's totally unreadable if the reader is a real person.

So I'm not about to rush out and do anything much to may adult sites but Steve and I will be watching our mainstream sites to see if there's some way we can improve the placement regardless of whether or not the search has used upper or lower case in their search terms.

Mainstream tries to copy Adult
It's funny how, when times are tough, even some of the most squeaky clean online marketers will try some tricky stuff just to make sales. If you've been around Adsense for a while then you will have heard of Joel Comm who built up quite a following when he started taking about monetizing your sites and blogs with Adsense.

Well now it seems that Mr. Comm might not have been making a whole lot of money lately because he's been a little smart and thought that he'd discovered a very tricky way of making even more ... in a way that's quite reminiscent of what some sponsors do over here in Adult.

Mr Comm decided that he could make money if he wrote a book and he offered it for sale through an affiliate network. The book cost the princely sum of $9.95 and you could pay for it online and download it as an ebook. If he had left it there everything would have been fine and dandy but ... well ... sometimes the thought of all that cash that's out there and that you're missing out on is hard to ignore.

It certainly was for Mr Comm so it seems that he decided that he had a foolproof method of making some extra cash. When you bought his book you were automatically subscribed to his monthly newsletter and that would have been cool too except for one small fact. Monthly subscriptions to his newsletter cost $29.95 a month.

So Mr Comm tried a little cross-sell magic ... and it didn't work. Instead he ended up with a lot of complaints and a serious loss of credibility. Perhaps he needs to spend a little more time over here in adult learning the adult way of doing cross-sales.