Last night the AdSense Blog announced two changes to the referral ad program just for referring people to the AdSense product (not AdWords, not Google Checkout, etc.).

Here is a sample live AdSense Referral Ad for the AdSense product:

Those changes are two fold:

(1) The pricing structure will change for publishers based in North America, Latin America, or Japan. You will be getting paid less. In the old pricing structure, you would earn $5 if the AdSense publisher you referred made $5 within 180 days, plus if that publisher made $100 within 180 days you get $250 plus if you referred 25 people who make $100 within a 180 days, you get a bonus of $2,000.

Now? You get a $100 if you refer someone who makes a $100 within a 180 days.

(2) If you are outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan you get paid zero, nothing for referring people to the AdSense product. Nothing.

AdSense ends off by saying:

We appreciate your support of this referral product, and hope it won’t cause you any inconvenience.

Any inconvenience? Give me a break! I personally don’t make money off the AdSense referral product but if people do, it seems insulting to take back what was once given. Imagine telling your sales force, you know that 40% commission we agreed on a couple years ago? Well, I got to cut it down to 10%. Oh, and you from India, your fired. Sorry for any inconvenience but thank you for your support!

As you can imagine, the forum discussion is a bit overwhelming in some forums.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld.

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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

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A Cre8asite Forums thread asks if Google orders the link reports at either a link:www.seroundtable.com command or via Google Webmaster Tools in level of importance.

Google’s JohnMu confirms the link: command as just being a random sample of your backlinks. He therefore says, since it is a random sample, ordering these results in level of importance does not really apply. But what about the results in Google Webmaster Tools?

JohnMu, a Googler, said:

I wouldn’t count on any list being in order of importance — after all, how do you measure importance? How can any tool know what you personally feel is important?

Scanning some of those link reports shows me that Google clearly is not ordering them by level of importance.

But is Yahoo? Take a look and you might think they do.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

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Last Wednesday we reported many people noticing that Google was showing them more Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools. Now, it appears that people are reporting via a DigitalPoint Forums thread that those Sitelinks are appearing in the search results.

I decided to take a look at my rustybrick search example, and I also am noticing more Sitelinks visible at Google.com.

December 19, 2007 Sitelinks in Google:

December 24, 2007 Sitelinks in Google:

The Sitelinks shown today, do not match the Sitelinks shown in Google Webmaster Tools from December 19th. I checked what Google webmaster tools shows today and they do match what I am currently seeing in Google.com.

So does it take four days to have Sitelinks from Google Webmaster Tools flow to Google.com search results? That assumption would be invalid. Hard to say what we saw last week was a bug or something else.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

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From Search Engine Roundtable - www.seroundtable.com

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Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

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From Search Engine Roundtable - www.seroundtable.com

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As expected Google released AdWords Editor 5.0 yesterday.

The new features include:

• Local business ads: View, add, and update your local business ads on the new Local Business Ads tab.
• Export picker: Select specific campaigns and ad groups to export to CSV.
• Save your searches: Use the ‘Name this search’ feature in Advanced search to save the settings for up to eight searches.
• Draft account: Like a draft campaign, a draft account may be shared with other AdWords Editor users. To post, export the account for archiving, then import it into a non-draft account.
• Default campaign targeting: In the Tools menu > Settings, specify a language and location for your new campaigns to target by default.
• Find errors quickly: If your campaigns contain items with errors or warnings, you’ll see splats at the top of the affected tabs.
• Maximize work space: View more rows in the data view by minimizing the other panels, such as error descriptions or ‘Review Proposed Changes.’

Check out the updated release notes for more changes and updates to the AdWords Editor.

The folks at WebmasterWorld are praising Google for providing such a useful editor but not everyone is sharing in the praise. Both Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums are not all that happy. The DigitalPoint Forums thread has a list of complaints, including:

• It still don’t work with PPA,
• it still don’t have a keyword tool,
• it still don’t create/view reports
• it still don’t allow you to change a lot of campaign settings
• it still don’t have a traffic estimator
• it still don’t support advanced budget features

In any event, when it comes to looking at what the competitors offer (i.e. adCenter and Panama), this blows them away.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, Google Groups and DigitalPoint Forums.

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Friday we reported that Google to Begin Treating Subdomains as Folders: Max 2 Results Per Search based on a post from Tedster at WebmasterWorld.

Soon after, Matt Cutts of Google commented saying:

This isn’t a correct characterization of what Google is looking at doing. What I was trying to say is that in some circumstances, Google may move closer to treating subdomains as we do with subdirectories. I’ll talk about this more at some point after I get back from PubCon.

But Matt didn’t offer us more hints as to what was meant by this in our comments area. So I swung back to the WebmasterWorld thread and saw that Matt spoke more with Tedster on the topic, where Tedster explained:

This change will NOT mean that it’s 100% impossible to rank subdomain urls in addition to urls from the main domain. The current plans are to make it harder to rank a third url, then even harder to rank a fourth, and so on with an increasing “damping factor”.

So this change will NOT mean that it’s 100% impossible to rank subdomain urls in addition to urls from the main domain. The current plans are to make it harder to rank a third url, then even harder to rank a fourth, and so on with an increasing “damping factor”.

Matt also did a video interview with Michael McDonald of WebProNews this afternoon, where he planned to bring more clarity to this issue. When that video goes live, we’ll have even more direct information.

But just now, Matt posted subdomains and subdirectories at his personal blog explaining it all.

Matt explained they use something called “host crowding,” a method Google used to show up to “two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name.” Matt said Google has already changed the likelihood that Google would show more than two results from the same hostname for the same search, this was done already in the “last few weeks.” For the most part, this change went unnoticed, until Matt said something to Tedster - which is why Matt needed to clarify. Matt explained:

This change doesn’t apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com. Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn’t affect a majority of our queries. In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed.

So, all in all, this change is extremely small and was not as big as I originally thought.

Has anyone seen a change in how Google ranks their sub-domains for “ego queries”?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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The Register reports about some corruption that was discovered within Wikipedia: the existence of a secret mailing list that cracks down on users why may be threats to Wikipedia administrators’ power. The article goes into depth about what ensued, what happened, the reaction, and the community is pretty shocked.

Can Wikipedia still be considered a trusted source by search engines with this information known? Well, most people say that there are always flaws in these sources, but the data is still more relevant than other search terms.

The real story here seems to be the paranoia and the heavy handed treatment of dissent by the Admin group. It comes down to control. I don’t think Jimbo wants to lose that.

Users will still be in control to keep the results relevant.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

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Scott Hendison (who I met at a variety of search conferences and will see at Pubcon — hi!) blogged about MSN ignoring 301 redirects: a site he had that ranked #1 in MSN was completely gone. After investigation, he found that the 301 was being ignored:

So domainname.com had a 301 redirect on it to domainname.com/directory/, but instad of following the 301, the MS Live bot just completely ignored the server directive, and cached the server page.

Over at Sphinn, it’s not a shock. Apparently MSN has been doing this for years. Yahoo and Google took awhile to sort out their redirects. The question is: does Microsoft know about it and do they intend to fix it?

Some suggest that they don’t:

It’s been a known fact that Microsoft prefers making new standards rather than follow it.

Well, what’s the new standards for a permanently moved page?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

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