Did you get the dreaded Google Adwords slap last week? I did.

By slap I’m referring to having a good percentage of your Adwords keywords going inactive unless their minimum bids are raised from let’s say around .25 to well over $1 and sometimes even as high as $10, which is what i got whacked with. If you are trying to get low-cost clicks, good luck. If you are low margin, again, good luck. Basically, if you get slapped, good luck!

This isn’t the first time Google has hit me. They did it back in March, and I guess they …

Thanks Google, thanks for March Madness. For those of you not hit, or slapped, by the mighty G this month with elevated, outrageous $10+ minimum bids for your precious keywords, you can stop reading. If you know what I’m talking about, good luck.

Every so often Google updates their Adwords quality score algorithm and in doing so crushes the campaigns of many an affiliate marketer by finding fault in their method, and forcing them to pay 10 to 20 times their current bid to remain active.

Unfortunately, looks like The G ran another such update last week wiping out a few …

Gmail IMAP on the iPhone, Quirky but Awesome!

Finally!  Gmail finally rolled IMAP out to my account.  I have been a Gmail user since the first days of its inception, back when you needed an invitation and they weren’t so easy to come by.  So why they decided to put me at the back of the line for the rollout is a mystery to me, but whatever.

In any case, it’s here and it’s glorious!  But it has some quirks.  Mainly, there is only a loose paradigm connection between the “folders” ideology and Gmail’s labels.  But I am confident that once I …

Here is a pretty interesting read from the Times online on Google and the privacy concern. I like Google, I use Google, I think they have some great apps, a great search engine, but at some point you have to draw the line with how much data you willingly provide to them.

The money/scary quote from the story:
Google’s overall goal is to have a record of every e-mail we have ever written, every contact whose details we have recorded, every file we have created, every picture we have taken and saved, every appointment we have made, every website we have …

If you read through some of the webmaster forums, you’ll find this scenario happening over and over again: A new webmaster creates a site that within a week or so gets indexed by Google with strong rankings for many of its top keywords, only to have those same lofty rankings come crashing down into the search neverland just a few weeks or a month later.

My take on this is that if you have a brand-new, never-been-used domain name and you build a website on it, Google will give you a grace or a honeymoon period during which time your …