c|net posted an article yesterday about how Google indavertantly revealed internal projections. Some of this leaked information should be of great importance (and very disturbing) for professional bloggers:

Google said that “AdSense margins will be squeezed in 2006 and beyond.”

It’s not like Google isn’t already making a ton of money from AdSense - the leak also said that:

Google expected ad revenue to grow from “$6 billion this year to $9.5 billion next year.”

So why does Google need to reduce publisher’s earnings even more?? As it is, earnings paid on AdSense clicks are marginal compared to what the advertisers are paying for those clicks (and what’s going in Google’s pockets).

Looks like bloggers need to take a better look at the Yahoo! Publisher Network (which is still in Beta) because Google is apparently planning on screwing AdSense publishers in the upcoming future.

As just another reason to not upgrade to WordPress 2.0 (or even install it in the first place for now), it’s been widely reported that WP 2.0’s live preview feature causes serious problems for those bloggers who utilize Google’s Adsense to monetize their blogs.

Lunacy Unleashed has a great article on dealing with the adsense problems in Wordpress 2.0 dealing with the adsense problems in Wordpress 2.0, as well as a few workarounds.

In sum, the problem stems from the fact that the live preview will try to fetch your google adsense ads, even if your post has not yet been published. This can be seriously problematic, as when google tries to determine appropriate contextually relevant ads for the page, it receives a 404 (page not found) error because the page does not yet exist. At a minimum, this could result in ads that aren’t relevant to the content on your page. At it’s worst, it could result in your adsense account being suspended, “since Google prohibits displaying ads on 404 pages”.

Not good.

Michael Hampton’s post provides details on how to get around this problem by modifying your template code (which beginning WP users are probably not so comfortable doing..) to put in a check to see if the what’s being displayed is a preview, and if so not display AdSense ads using the following code:

// Paste your AdSense code here //

Unfortunately, this workaround still results in multiple problems, the first one being that there is a known bug with the is_preview() function in WP 2.0. Furthermore, the abovementioned code only works ‘inside the loop’ (see Matt Read’s post for help in understanding “the loop”, as well as the information on The Loop in the wordpress codex)

Michael suggests yet another workaround for those who want to place their ads outside the loop (a common occurence) in the form of the following code:

is_preview): ?>
// Paste your AdSense code here //

HOWEVER, because of the problems with the is_preview function being quirky in WP 2.0, these workarounds don’t always work and in the words of EUGENIUS, “It looks like until is_preview is fixed, don’t put adsense on the WordPress (2.0) blog.”

To me, I find this unbelievably unacceptable -with the given propensity for the majority of bloggers these days to utilize Google AdSense ads on their blogs, I simply cannot understand how it is possible that this was not resolved prior to WordPress 2.0’s being released, and is reason alone not to use it (never mind upgrade your existing installations to WP 2!) And shouldn’t there be a simple checkbox to just turn live preview off for those of us who would rather have AdSense ads working on our site than see a live preview of our post?? How hard would that really be?

As is often the case whenever there is a free tool available, it gets abused by spammers. Such has been the case with Google’s free Blogger service, and lately they’ve been very active in trying to delete blogs that they view as spam (aka splogs).

Normally I’d say that’s a good thing, but apparently they’ve been a little overzealous in their cleansing of the system and many individuals are reporting that their legitimate, hand crafted Blogger blogs that they spent much time on have been deleted without warning or explanation.

The English Guy has a post entitled Google/Blogger Deleting Real Blogs that I’d highly recommend reading if you’re a current Blogger user or considering using their free service.

A thread at the Blog Party forum suggests that Google is targeting bloggers that have multiple blogs which link to each other. This is a tactic which many legit bloggers do and is a major part of how the whole blogosphere works. It is also a tactic that is used by sploggers. But that in and of itself should not be a reason to go on a search and destroy mission for all bloggers who interlink their sites. The logic in that is faulty - just because a tactic is used by sploggers doesn’t mean that everyone who uses that tactic IS a splogger.

So if you’re using Blogger and you have multiple blogs which you like to link to each other, you might consider porting your posts over to another system, such as TypePad or WordPress.com, before you wake up one day to find your blogs gone and have to go through the nightmare of trying to reach support personel (which has been reported to be very difficult) and proving that your blogs are legitimate.

Consider yourselves warned..