Well, Google is doing it again. As if the payout drop from $250 to $100 wasn’t bad enough, Google is ending the AdSense Referrals program in about a month (End of August 2008 - see details).

If you didn’t find a good alternative for AdSense referrals last time, then you better get busy now. Though $300 of my earnings for this month did come from AdSense referrals, I did learn a valuable lesson last time, and spread out my portfolio quite a bit.

A much higher percentage of my monthly income now comes from my own products, though there is still good money to be made from product referrals (Thank goodness for Text-Link-Ads … “knock on wood”. ).

So if you haven’t done so yet, I’d suggest that you diversify, because all good things must come to an end (or at least a slow-down) at some point, and you don’t want to get caught off guard.

Maybe it’s just me, but since I downloaded and started using Firefox 3 web browser, I’ve been extremely frustrated with the behavior of the new “Smart Location Bar”.

This thing is supposed to be “A quick way to get to the sites you love—even the ones with addresses you only vaguely remember”, but for me, it’s just plain cumbersome and annoying, spouting out totally off the wall guesses at what I’m typing, when I just want the regular auto-complete feature.

I searched all of the menus with no luck, and even went as far as to switch back to Firefox 2.

Fortunately, I found a fix for this Location bar issue.

1. Type about:config into the location bar, and press enter/ return to access the advanced preferences.
- You’ll get an alert saying: something like… “This may void your warranty”, but just click the button to Accept.

2. In the long list of items, look for browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped (you can either scroll down, or use the search)

3. double click it to set it to TRUE.

4. Finally, to make the auto complete function only show single line suggestions (instead of the 2 line suggestions), you’ll need to install a Firefox extension called the oldbar extension.

Doing this has made the working with the new Firefox much more bearable.

FireBug
If you’re a web developer, one more mandatory update you’ll need to make to get your new firefox up to speed is upgrading to the new Firebug extension.

Well, it’s almost 5 months later now, (thanks for all of the supportive comments), and things are going a lot better. We got a wheelchair ramp built, help from several family members (so I don’t have to come over every day any more), and even bi-weekly visits from nurses. So the situation with my great uncle is much better now.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for SEOlogs. Several months of not blogging, and not updating/ fixing tools has left the site in a pretty poor state, both in terms of earnings and traffic.

Over the past year or so, SEOlogs has earned over $10,347 (see screen captures below). Over the past few months though, earnings have really taken a hit.

I’ve had several people offer to buy the site, but I hesitate because there is a so much history here. There’s been the RedScowl Bluesingsky contest. And more recently, coming in 2nd place in the myBlogLog community building contest.

This site got me interested in making money online, and several of the successful sites that I’ve created (like dnScoop.com and myIpneighbors.com) were born of this site.

I’ve actually considered either partnering with, or even just paying someone to help maintain the site, but for now, since I have some extra time, I’m going to try to get things up to par myself.

Any comments, ideas, or questions are welcome as always.

Income from Adsense contextual ads:

ReviewMe Income

TLA income for seologs.com (Most TLA links were removed from the site in January, and all by February)

SEOBook Sales

IBP Sales Income

TLA Referrals - seologs.com made $1,275 from Text-Link-Ads Referrals

Adsense Referrals - seologs made about $1200 from of this $9310.51 from Google Adsense Referrals

Traffic

Since Jan 1, 2007

The question of whether we should use <STRONG> tags vs <B> tags in one of our larger sites came up recently while we were implementing some changes, based on the recommendations of one of the SEO companies who are consulting with us (at my job).

One company recommended that we use <STRONG>, and not <B>, probably because it is what the WC3 recommends, however, we’ve been using the old bold <B> tag forever.

Being a little bit lazy (I really didn’t feel like making a mass change across a site of over 16,000 pages to change B to STRONG), and also a bit curious, because I could have sworn that I heard Matt Cutts say that it didn’t really matter which you use, I decided to do a little looking around.

It turns out that according to Matt and the actual Google engineers who weight the particular algorithm elements, <STRONG> and <B> are exactly the same when it comes to ranking and optimizing pages.

The exact same goes for EM vs ITALICS tags (<EM> and <I>), no difference at all.

I’d like to personally congratulate Google for “Keeping it Real”.

Also, if you’d like to hear it from the horses mouth, here you go…

Looks like toolbar pagerank is on the move. I’ve checked several entries in the dnscoop history, and things started changing last night.

Anyone seeing changes?