However, like usual JenSense has done an outstanding analysis of what really changed, and there are some surprises. I would highly recommend reading through this to make sure you understand all the changes.

According to the website:

Due to the challenging economic environment, we’re sorry to announce that we’ve made the difficult business decision to postpone the O’Reilly Found Conference, which was to take place June 9-11 in Burlingame, CA.

That’s too bad, because this conference did seem to offer a bit of a different view than most SEO oriented conferences.

If you are interested in going but haven’t registered yet, ShoeMoney is giving away tickets.

The conference features several sessions from AdSense employees, so it will be a good opportuniuty to get some questions answered. In addition there will be some great people like Jennifer Slegg and Jeremy Schoemaker to rub elbows with. I’ll be there as well.

Since I run mostly WordPress sites, I have started using Eric Giguere’s Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress. This seems to do a pretty good job, and hopefully if there are more updates to the AdSense privacy policy requirements, it will be a simple update. You can check out AdMoolah’s privacy policy to see a sample of what it generates.

JenSense also just came up with a good sample privacy policy that you can use with any site.

Some quotes from the article:

Our tipster says that he receiving from four times more in revenue Microsoft than Google AdSense. And the money isn’t the only advantage PubCenter has over AdSense. The advertisement themselves are are higher quality than Google’s ads, he says, and equally as targeted towards the content.

We also heard that Microsoft is allowing publishers to get creative with ads by allowing them to set background images. Google AdSense only allows publishers to change the color of the ads.

This could be great news for current AdSense publishers. We need a serious competitor. Yahoo has been trying with its Yahoo Publisher program (which has been languishing in beta since 2005), but most people report being very disappointed by the earnings..

Google is always testing changes like these to a limited set of users to see what affect they have. My guess is that these icons will increase the click-through-rate on these ads. There have been some other reports from people seeing these as well, but my screen shot is the first I’ve heard of a US based search showing these results.

I’m sure if these icons do increase click-through-rates, publishers will like the addition!

Do a search for anything related to your keyword in Google (using the ~ operator) while also using the keyword as a negative term in the search (using the – operator). Then look for any bolded words in the results. These bolded words are what Google considers related. To get even more words, run the search again using all of the words you found as negative keywords.

So for example, if you want to find any words related to “mortgage” use the following search:

~mortgage -mortgage

When you run this you will notice that the words “finance”, “refinance”, “lending” and “bank” are are bolded. So Google considers these words related to “mortgage”. Now run the search again using the new words as negative keywords, like this:

~mortgage -mortgage -finance -refinance -lending -bank

This results in some new related words: “financial”, “interest” and “corp”. You can keep adding these to the negative keyword list until Google stops finding words.

You now have a new list of words that you might consider as keywords in a PPC campaign or for using as keywords in SEO.

Today Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a solution to this problem: a new way to use the HTML link element. The link element is used to specify a relationship between two pages. It can be used to specify things like a stylesheet or rss feed for a page.

Now there is a new standard “canonical” value for the rel attribute of the tag. The HTML will look something like this:

<a rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products/cameras”/>

Place this tag in the head section of the HTML of any of the pages that have duplicate content and your done.

For example, all of these following pages might have the same content:
http://www.example.com/products/cameras
http://www.example.com/products/cameras?sort=price
http://www.example.com/products/cameras/all

If all three of these pages have the same content then the same canonical link tag should be on each of them.

This should be a good way to ease webmasters worry about duplicate content issues. You can get more information from Yahoo’s announcement,d Google’s announcement and Microsoft’s announcement.

The combination WordCamp and Affiliate Summit was too good to pass up. Las Vegas is a great place for me to go to conferences, because its close enough to drive and there always great deals on hotels, so the costs are minimal. Registration fees were minimal this time too because WordCamp is only $20 and I managed to snag a free ASW silver pass thanks to ShoeMoney.

So now I am in the process of moving all the rest of my websites to my DreamHost account. This is something I should have done a long time ago, but never got around to. Since I’m repeating the same steps over and over, I thought I’d come up with a check list of steps to do when switching hosts to make sure I don’t forget things as I go along. Here is that list, with some comments.

Most of the sites I have are WordPress sites, so I have some specific details about that, but these steps can be generalized for any type of site. Obviously, if you don’t have a database, some of the steps don’t apply.

1. Download all files from old server via FTP

2. Export Database(s) in SQL format using PHP Admin

• It is a good idea to delete spam using the WordPress admin console before exporting to reduce the file size.
• Do not use the WordPress export feature to transfer your database. If you do, then you won’t be able to import the new files until your Name Servers have properly switched, and your users may experience downtime.

3. Create domain on new host

4. Create database on new host

5. Import the SQL data from step 2 using PHP Admin of the new host

6 Change the information in configuration files to match the new DB setting

• For WordPress make sure you change wp-config.php

7. Upload (via FTP) the WordPress files from step 1

8. Set up any required mailboxes at the new domain

• Lately I’ve been setting up GMail for all my domain, which Dreamhost provides automatically

9. Switch Name Servers at domain registrar

10. Wait for the change to take place

• This could take anywhere from an hour to a day
• To check when the switch has happened, look at your access logs. When you see activity, some traffic is reaching the new server, however, you may not yet be able to get to your new server using the domain name, it just depends how the domain name information propagates.

Hopefully it can save you some headaches if you decide to switch hosts in the future.