Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Well here we are at the last day of May. For you guys in the northern hemisphere it's the start of summer and of course that means the start of the good old summer slow down. For ordinary people out there this May has just been like any other but for Webmasters, whether you've noticed it or not, this May has been very interesting.

This year the summer slow down came early and many Webmasters have been complaining that they have seen big drops in their income right through the month. I've already talked about that here during May so I'm not going to rehash it again but it's just one of the factors that have gone towards making this May so interesting.

Another factor was an announcement by Google about the middle of the month that they would be making big changes to their Adsense program. For some those changes were definitely worth cheering about while for others ... well there have definitely been some very long faces on many Webmasters who were making a lot of money from Adsense.

When Google first started the Adsense program they were looking to place those wonderful little Adsense ads on pages that contained original content. They considered that ads on those pages would attract people who were genuinely interested in finding out more about the product in the ad.

Of course Webmasters are a crafty and cunning bunch and it wasn't long before many realized that they could make more from Adsense advertising with less work if they could get those ads to appear on pages that contained very little content. Without much content to keep the surfer interested the obvious place for them to go was off to one of the advertisers in the Adsense ads.

As soon as someone clicked on one of those ads the Webmaster made money and the advertiser got a rather unmotivated potential customer. Of course Google made lots of money in the process too so it did take a while for Google to realize that it might be in their best interests to change the rules for Webmasters.

And that's what Google did about the middle of May. It seems that Google has written to every Adsense advertiser who was using those low-content pages and informed them that their accounts would be closed on June 1.

There were some people who were making a lot of money from those ads and now, in just a few hours time, their income will stop. If you're one of those then I do feel sorry for you but you must have realized that the end would come sooner rather than later. Advertisers want a reasonable return on their advertising dollar and they just weren't getting it from surfers who were arriving from sites that had little value.

For those of us who were putting Adsense ads on pages that contained original content then there is the hope that we might see increased payouts but I'm not one of those who think that increased payouts are a certainty. Besides it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with yet another way of exploiting Adsense advertising.

There was another interesting little happening in May that involved Google too. It actually happened way back on May 11 but there was no fanfare, no major announcement and it's really only come to light in the last few days.

As we all know, Google has been acquiring a variety of companies in several different verticals as it sets out to extend its reach into the advertising world but this acquisition had nothing to do with advertising. This one has to do with Internet security.

Back on May 11 Google acquired GreenBorder Technologies. This company has an interesting piece of software that protects against virus, spyware and trojan threats by watching the Internet session from the rest of the PC as well as from earlier Internet sessions. If GreenBorder finds a problem it then highlights the threat.

A visit to GreenBorder's site shows that they have basically stopped selling the software although they are continuing to support existing users. So does that mean we might see yet another piece of software being offered as part of Google's free software package or are they going to do something quite different with it?

Could we one day see search results where every site that is listed has been filtered by GreenBorder and sites that pose a potential threat are clearly marked for the surfer? It will definitely be interesting to watch.

So that was May, I wonder what June has in store for us?