As I say, a non-exhausted method to get some extra hits in this over populated niche is a Gold mine!

SEO discovery of the week

If you were keeping an eye on your SERPs, you might have noticed that this week there were some major changes in them. This blog was ranking at 20-30 for the keyword “Make Money Blogging” and it just fell to 40 overnight.

Curious about this devil dance, I was searching for the odds and ends of this. And it was then I found out that I’m not the only one. In fact, as a new measure, it’s believed in the SEO community that effective from now on, Google will weigh anchor text lesser than how it used to. Why? Everyone buys paid links for their targeted anchor text and no matter how irrelevant the site is, it’s ranking gets a boost. And that was just a major loophole in the Google algorithm.

How to restore your SERPs? Well, make the content relevant to the keywords you’re targeting. Of course, the blackhat approach would be Keyword Stuffing.

AdSense’s weird CSS behavior – busted!

I was doing some SEO consultancy for my friend Eranda over at Antharjalaya, when his AdSense units just gave up. I was modifying his CSS and Theme Files – tweaking them for SEO purposes, when his AdSense units just became unresponsive.

They were being displayed, no problem there. But except for the top ad in the block (he was using 250×250 blocks) the others were not-clickable., as in, when you click them, nothing happens. This was too weird. (To make things more complex, he was floating the AdSense blocks inline with text) It took me around 5 hours of troubleshooting to pin-point the problem. And adding to my misery, I found many people with the same problem when I was searching for an answer – but not the actual answer anywhere.

The problem was in the CSS layering. Sounds too weird? When AdSense ads become unclickable, it is because one of your divs (or something of that sort) is actually hovering over your AdSense unit. (This can be triggered by incorrect XHTML markup, especially incorrect DOCTYPE deceleration) The best thing to do is to put a <div> tag around the AdSense unit and set the z-index to a very high number. Like this:

<div style="z-index:99;">
AdSense Code
</div>

The solution came to me quite intuitively and as of that I’m not surprised that no one had found the solution to this problem before.

Of course, I wouldn’t post my full discovery about AdSense blocks behavior, and my findings here for the greater good. Why? Let’s just say that if I did so here, lots of black hatters would be killing AdSense with macros – earning a lot of ‘cents’ – with fraudulent clicks that look completely natural.

Oh and if you want any SEO consultancy services for your blog, just shoot me a message. Eranda will tell you how awesome I am

Contest Update

3 days elapsed and already an update? Well, making up for a big mistake I did when mentioning one of great sponsors – AuctionSiteWriter – I’d like you guys to know that they are having a really cool deal over there for ROCKFUSE readers.

If you want to buy AuctionSiteWriter, and need a killer discount, guys at 1CoolFile will give $10CAD off their normal prize if you e-mail them with the subject “ROCKFUSE Blog Contest”, and tell that you’re par-taking in the contest. Of course, they will refund your money if you actually win that in the blog contest

If you haven’t joined the contest yet, well, you know what to do?

In the spotlight

Finally, these were some articles discovered on my feed reader and blog-hopping that are totally worthy of a mention!

Don’t Waste Your Adspace On Bidvertiser: Turnip tells us why we all should stay away from Bidvertiser! The claims made in this post seems pretty solid and it had definitely changed my perspective on Bidvertiser. If you’re trying out Bidvertiser on your blog, promoting it or doing anything at all with it, then you should read it before promoting them furthermore!

Tagging 101 – Tags, Clouds and More: Probably the most comprehensive guide to tagging you’ll ever read! Keving shares the basics, social media approach and some cool plugins to help you get more out of your tags!

3 part Yahoo! Buzz experiment: Matt over at Blogging Fingers is doing a through analysis of Yahoo! Buzz. If you’re promoting your blog in Yahoo! Buzz, well, this is a must read for you. Matt talks about a lot of things concerning Yahoo! Buzz. At the time of this post’s submission, it seems like the last part is yet to be published by Matt.

Is It a Big Deal To Be on Yahoo Top Buzz?: Is it? You might want to read Eranda’s post to find out! Most of you will be really surprised by his findings – rest assured!

Grow Your Business with “Konnects”: Thanks to this post, I was able to fid this really cool young-entrepreneurs-only version of LinkedIn. (Well, it has nothing to do with LinkedIn) but certainly seems to be building authority.

Related Posts

• July 2008 PageRank Update – An early analysis
• How to add AdSense Code to the middle of every Blog Post within 5 minutes, automatically!
• The top 5 Google AdSense alternatives
• 14 Wordpress Plugins that will help you make more money from Google AdSense on your blog.
• And the winner is…