Google has retired their Adsense referral program. Here is the email they sent:

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense
Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate
your patience during this transition and here are some alternative
options to consider:

* Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of
DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now
operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting
users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense
Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers
to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For
further details, please visit: www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.

* AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense
for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the
referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google
products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals
code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:

* Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
ad space.

* Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create
and save all reports related to the referrals program on your
desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign
information

8 things I hate about Facebook

1. The Name: I mean how in the world did they come up with the name Facebook. I guess Mark(the founder) was one time checking out his high school year book reminiscing the past by looking at the faces of his friends and mates. Then suddenly he came up with this great idea of putting an online profile students gallery, he couldn’t think of a name for it so he looked at the year book once again and browse all the faces in every page hoping to get inspired from the faces and looks of all the students there..

So after reaching the last page of the yearbook, he finally came up with the word Facebook? Who knows.. Who cares..

2. The Theme: Blue is probably the most commonly used color on the net, you want proof, check out the websites of large groups like Google, Microsoft, Paypal, MSN, MySpace, Wikipedia, Blogger, hell even my Windows XP theme is blue.. Can’t Facebook use another color?? Let say, Red, Yellow, Orange.. Red Orange, Yellow Orange, Yellow Red… I guess thats the secret to a website’s success.. A blue theme.. So I am calling everyone’s attention to change their website’s theme to Blue.. Lets go..

3. Facebook’s Favourite Icon:
Has Facebook ran out of idea or what? Have you seen its website’s favourite icon?
It looks almost exactly like the old Macromedia now Adobe Flash Icon, except the F
on the flash  icon is a bit curvy and more stylish/modern. I wonder who in Facebook
came up with this idea?! If you are reading this, facebook favourite icon maker, come up with something better OK..

4. Super Poke! Isn’t it annoying getting superpoked everyday every hour? The first time I was super poked it was by a lady friend of mine, I got a message “Courteney has hugged Zac” and I was  like, “Hmm, I have a feeling this chick likes me..” the next day I was super poked again by the same friend, the message was “Courteney has kissed Zac” I was surprised! I thought, “Hooo.. this chick wants me badd…” then to my disappointment, I received the same message from another friend named Robert, then there goes the story of how I found out what Super Poke really is.. Damn you Super Poke! Stop flooding my Super Duper Poke Board!

5. Status Update: Oh this is really giving me the sheets.. Everytime I logged in or go in the Facebook Homepage I always see new Status Updates of my friends in the right sidebar. What annoys me is, the content of every updates and its duration gap.. Let say for example: “Glenda is so excited about going to Hawaii” Updated 2 mins ago… then 10 mins later “Glenda is looking forward to her trip to Hawaii” … 1 hour later “Glenda is asking everyone whats the best place to visit in hawaii“.. Oh for Glenda’s sake!! Someone pay attention to her Status Update and drop her a quick Wall Message to shut up…

6. Applications: There are so many crappy applications, let me tell ya! Most of them bores me out of hell.. Who wants to be a warewolf or a vampire? Who wants to pet a monkey that runs 100kph while scratching his head.. Who wants to have a carebear photo in their profile! I mean, these are all for young kids, how professional can you get? But if you are thinking “Zac, if its for young kids and you dont like it why are you using it.!” Well.. well.. what ever you’re thinking or saying I dont really care.. Even those carebears dont freaking care…..

7. The Ads! Most of them are irrelevant, like this one.. “Snoring bothering you?” Facebook Ads is asking me the question… But how would I know that I snore when I’m sound asleep? And I ain’t paying for any snoring product for a friend or for anyone.. If they snore, its their problem not mine.. Come on Facebook, come up with some useful ads.. Not these crappy ones..

8. The Losers on Facebook: Those who published all their wacky photos in Facebook without knowing that they loose ownership of it. Losers..

If you hate something about Facebook, feel free to post a comment.. 

It is recommended to use keywords in page titles itself. This title tag is different from a Meta tag, but it’s worth considering it in relation to them. Whatever text one places in the title tag (between the <title> and </title> portions) will appear in the title bar of browsers when they view the web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or OPERA.

The actual text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major web crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

If you have designed your website as a series of websites or linked pages and not just a single Home Page, you must bear in mind that each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content will draw traffic to your site.The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first design their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Actually most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site and decided it is worth book marking.

So, while you want your business name in the title of the home page, it is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. Why not consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will display closer to the top of the search engine listing.

Dedicating first three positions for keywords in title avoiding the stop words like ‘and’, ‘at’ and the like is crucial in search engine optimization.

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine. A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.