It’s great when a person or a company gets their just deserts.

I recently read a Huffington Post story about how Aaron Greenspan (not to be confused with the former Fed boss) sued Google in small claims court and won. Google “disabled” his AdSense account with no explanation and no recourse. Greenspan sued and won $761.00, plus $40 to make up for the suit’s filing fee. It’s a great article. You can read it here.

How much is a moral victory worth? Round trip from the east coast to California, plus food, lodging and other miscellaneous expenses? If the Googleplex was located in my county, I would have considered suing Google in small claims court when the company decided to terminate my AdSense account years ago. But since it’s in Mountain View, CA, for me — and for most — the whole enterprise would be too expensive to be practical. Mr. Greenspan had a distinct advantage in that his business is located within walking distance of the Clara County courthouse in Palo Alto, CA, which is exactly where you have to go if you want to sue Google in small claims court. He literally walked to the courthouse to file the lawsuit.

Even though I lost about $1,000 when Google closed my account, the end result was that I made a whole lot more money. That’s because I was relying too heavily on AdSense to monetize my sites, and AdSense should never be a publisher’s main source of revenue (especially since an account can be killed at any time!) I was earning between $0.50 and $7 per click, but the high-quality, targeted traffic I was sending to other sites was making a lot more money for the owners of those sites. Yep. After I reconfigured my sites, I ended up making 15 to 20 times more than I was with AdSense. A costly lesson, but one that helped me become a far more successful publisher, and an employer.

I currently use Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) ads on certain sites in my portfolio, and so far it’s been great. I joined YPN soon after my AdSense account was disabled, and it’s been nothing but smooth sailing since. With YPN, the ad targeting and ad inventory has never been as good as AdSense. However, if my AdSense account was still active today, I’m 99% certain that I would choose to stick with YPN and use the platform’s manual ad targeting feature, rather than sweat over the interminable threat of the AdSense ax. My sites contain prime content. I don’t deserve such nonsense.

These days, I do business with Google only when I have to. It’s not just because my AdSense account was closed. Right now, I have a site that has no Pagerank^TM on any of it’s pages, despite having thousands of quality incoming links. The site isn’t banned from Google, but it’s obviously suffering one of Google’s penalties, and I have no idea why. No blackhat SEO — ever — and all original content. Google recently lifted an unjust and heavy penalty from another robust site I own, so I was expecting all silly penalties to be lifted by now. Despite numerous attempts to get the penalty removed, the sites is still being punished for no reason. This penalty caused the following ugly situation: content pirates stole my good content and put it on their own spammy sites, which resulted in phrases from that same stolen content ranking far above my own site in the Google search engine results pages (SERP’s.) I’m still wasting a lot of time faxing DMCA complaints to get my stolen content removed from those illegitimate websites (kudos to HubPages.com for responding very fast to my complaint.) So, can you blame me for being pissed?

I still admire Google and love many of their free services like Gmail, Analytics, Translate, Maps, Earth, Calendar, etc. (though I feel like I have paid to use them.) Google is constantly tweaking it’s policies and algorithm, so I’m hoping they shed their not-so-enlightened and near-tyrannical policies before they alienate any more publishers.

Bottom line: Google is a rich company. They need to hire a lot more talented people to handle complaints from legitimate publishers.

I’ve been trying to move my feeds from FeedBurner to my Google account for some time, but a glitch in the migration process has me stuck at this page:

When I click the [Next] button, I returned to the same page. If I click on “cancel and do not move feeds,” I am taken to this page:

Then, when I click on the [Move my account now] button, I am taken back to — you guessed it — the “Move feeds to your Google Account” page (the first screen shot above.)

Talk about frustrating.

Right now, I have no access to my FeedBurner stats; Google is moving all FeedBurner accounts to its own feeds management system. Can anyone offer any insight?

I’m no longer able to run the free domain name contest here at the Domain Blog, but I just started a “Guess the DJIA” contest at www.DebtHelp.tv. Winner gets $10 cash via PayPal. Click here.

One of my favorite promos is back: Buy anything at Buy.com and get a free domain name. Here are the details:

“…Get a FREE GoDaddy® Domain Name for one year with purchase at Buy.com! Simply check the “Check Here” box found on the GoDaddy banner on the Buy.com cart summary page to receive a unique redemption code…”

Use the following link to take advantage of this offer:

GoDaddy.com® Free Domain Name Offer. Limited Time Offer

Enjoy!

This recession has me cutting back in many ways. It also has me looking for ways to make my sites more productive.

Just the other day, I shutdown all the offering at my www.amcy.org website. Web development, web hosting, domain name registration, search engine optimization, Internet merchant accounts — all gone. Most of the services I was offering at AmCy.org hadn’t made money in a long time — and some of them were costing me money! — so it was time to let them go. The site is now a glorified contact page. Yep. It was my first successful venture on the web, so, as you can imagine, there’s a soft spot for it in my heart (sniff.)

AMCY.ORG is a valuable LLLL.org domain name, registered and consistently online since August 19, 1998. So, of course, I’ll be hanging onto it and keeping at least the homepage up.

Many of my sites have been around for a while and are therefore trusted. So, with this recession breathing down my neck like an oppressive boss with chronic halitosis, I decided that it’s time to sell some links. Not too comfortable with the idea, but this hard economic downturn’s got me in survival mode.

In my search for a link broker, I can across LinkAdage.com. I read some good things about the company over at the DP Forums, so I decided to give them a try.

When I arrived at the LinkAdage.com new publisher signup page where they ask for my details, I was shocked and amazed to find that they had the audacity to ask for all my personal info, including my social security number, without providing me with a secure page. Hey, LinkAdage.com: what is up with that? See for yourself: http://brokerage.linkadage.com/signup_pub.php

No excuse for this. The cost of having a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate has come down over the years, to the point that just about anyone can afford one. IMHO, if you can afford a domain name, you can afford an SSL certificate! Right now, you can visit www.GoDaddy.com and buy an SSL certificate for $29.99 per year (that’s less than the $35 Network Solutions used to charge for a year’s worth of domain name registration back when they were the only game in town.) Some sites, like Rapidsslonline.com, are even cheaper. I can recommend GoDaddy because I’ve used their SSL certificates on my clients’ sites in the past. Rapidsslonline.com may also be good, but I don’t have any experience with them so I can’t testify on their behalf.

Text-Link-Ads.com has a good setup. I used to buy links at that site a couple of years ago, but I don’t anymore. All my sites are now mature enough that I don’t need to purchase text links.

As a publisher, what I don’t like about Text-Link-Ads.com is that they don’t pay as well as I had hoped. I did some research and found that in their pricing, they tend to focus on PageRank, as opposed to focusing on keyword/keyphrase rankings, volume of legitimate traffic and content quality, which is the way it should be IMO. Every publisher who’s been in the game long enough knows that PageRank is virtually meaningless these days.

In all fairness to Text-Link-Ads.com, I called them to ask about their pricing, and they told me that they start everyone low, then increase a publisher’s rate if demand for a publisher’s spots increases. This seems quite sensible to me, but I’m not ready to capitulate and accept $10 – $25 per month per ad (not for my high-profile sites, anyway.)

So my search continues. If you know of any quality link brokers, please feel free to share by posting a comment. Thanks.

Is BlogExplosion.com dead?

I had been using it to drive some extra traffic to my blogs. I don’t remember when I started using it, but it was more than a year ago.

It works as a “blog viewing” exchange. The system presents me with blogs, and I have to view each one for at least 30 seconds. I get credit for each blog viewed. I can use these credits to get other members to view my blogs, for at least 30 seconds, of course.

But it seems that BlogExplosion.com is dead. I haven’t been able to access the site for the last 3 days.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not too surprised. This recession is going to cause a lot of Internet startups to close and close suddenly. I know first hand how hard it is to make a real living online.

I’ve been scaling back a lot over the past two weeks. I closed down my web hosting site the other day. It was a waste of money. Going to concentrate on consolidating my other money-making sites now, and producing a lot more content.