News Source: http://www.sugarrae.com
Published: Aug 16, 2008 - 08:03 am
Story Found By: crashingflwrgrl 1739 Days ago
Category: PPC
28 Comments
Sorry this site requires JavaScript to be enabled in your browser. See the following guide on How to enable JavaScript in Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Safari. Alternatively you may be blocking JavaScript with an advert-related or developer plugin. Please check your browser plugins.
News Source: http://www.sugarrae.com
Published: Aug 16, 2008 - 08:03 am
Story Found By: crashingflwrgrl 1739 Days ago
Category: PPC
28 Comments
Upcoming Conferences
Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.
Join us at an upcoming SMX event:
- SMX Paris - June 6-7 2013
- SMX Advanced - June 11-12, 2013
- SMX East - October 1-3, 2013
- SMX Stockholm - October 14-15, 2013
- SMX Milan - November 7-8, 2013
- SMX Social Media Marketing - November 20-21, 2013
- SMX Israel - January 2014
- SMX West - March 11-13, 2014
- SMX Munich - March 25-26, 2014
- SMX Sydney - April 2014
- SMX London - May 2014
Latest News From Marketing Land
- Nutella Gives In, Allows Fan To Continue With “World Nutella Day”
- How To Organize Your Informational Content: A Case Study
- Apple Remains Most Valuable Brand, While Facebook Falls & Yahoo Returns To Top 100 [Brandz]
- Nutella Tells Fan To Stop Promoting It, Social Media Backlash Ensues
- Transformative Analytics — Envisioning The Next Generation Of Social Media Marketing Tools
- - See more news at Marketing Land -
Upcoming Webcasts
Learn more about search marketing with our free online webcasts and webinars from our sister site, Digital Marketing Depot. Upcoming online events include:
- Taking your PLA Campaigns to the Next Level - Jun 4
- Increase Shares, Tweets, Likes, and Pins to Fuel Search and Drive Engagement - May 30
- Take a Closer Look at Links – Why a Site Ranks - May 21
- The Future of Digital Marketing Services: Where Will Agencies be in 2014? - May 15
- Unlock the Key to Successful Forecasting and Conversions with Big Data - Jun 20
Research:
- B2B Marketing Automation Tools 2013: The Buyer’s Guide
- Enterprise SEO Tools 2013: A Buyer’s Guide
- Enterprise Social Media Management Software
Whitepapers:
- PPC Bid Management Guide
- The Marketer’s Guide to Driving ROI From Facebook Advertising
- Collaborative Customer Interactions Management
- How To Create a Data-Driven Dynasty
- Top 10 Ways to Improve Digital Experiences
Latest News From Search Engine Land
Comments
Its not actually adsense ad. its just an image of one. the adsense ads in twitters google cache is not clickable, I wonder how they still manage to make it contexual?
It actually is an adsense ad and not an image of one - from the source: google_ad_client = "pub-3167622637866239"; google_alternate_color = "9AE4E8"; google_ad_width = 234; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "234x60_as"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_color_border = "FFFFFF"; google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_link = "0000ff"; google_color_text = "000000"; google_color_url = "000000"; I am guessing you can’t click on it because the div with the picture and name is laying on top of it, but that is just a guess, cause I suck at css ;-)
I just checked the examples in the article and from my end I can’t see ads. Am i missing something or did they already fix things?
I’m still seeing ads on the caches.
Yep I noticed this some time back and wondered what they were playing at. Looking around I saw they had run Adsense as an experiment and stopped. I was just seeing old messages with the ads on, not the news ones, so assumed Google had not updated their cache on these. http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/04/twitter-removes-adsense-ads.htmlYou’re right though Rae, now there are cached Adsense on very recent comments made this week. So sometime in the last few months they have turned this on again. Maybe during one of their system meltdowns someone reloaded an old version of the code and have now turned it off again? Or they ran another test and no one noticed?
No you’re right, blatently cloaking for Google. Look at this Tweet of mine:http://twitter.com/nickwilsdon/statuses/887709381Now run through Google translate to get a Google IP:http://google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fnickwilsdon%2Fstatuses%2F887709381&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=fr&tl=enNo idea why they would be doing this though, cache has limited views and it’s not even clickable. I need my morning coffee :)
Weirdness. Its a good example of why a company should at least occasionally be working with an SEO consultant so the web devs don’t do anything this cryptic.
>>>No idea why they would be doing this thoughYeah, the why was curious to me too, but hopefully, they’ll be forcedto provide Google with some type of explanation if this gets in front of enough people.
re: CSS - it’s behind < h2 class="thumb" > so you can’t click it. pretty goofy placement, sure looks like a mistake.
Even if it isn’t clickable to the point of costing advertisers money, it adds to their impressions and drops their click through rates - which affects their bid prices.
And actually, some are clickable - finally found one thanks to a tweet that made the suggestion to look for shorter usernames from bunltd (and my realization I needed to find a shorter username that was coupled with a longer ad title) - see addendum at the bottom of my post: http://www.sugarrae.com/is-twitter-cloaking-their-site-to-show-adsense-ads-in-their-cache/
Ok, i can see the ads now. Before i couldn’t because I had the Ads Blocking Plugin on in FF. Honestly this looks like a mistake. I don’t think that this is anything more then some one using old code from back when they tested the adsence. More examples of twitter’s inability to keep the "gremlins" out of their system.
>>>mistakeI might agree if the adsense wasn’t seemingly being cloaked to only appear in the cache and wasn’t on status messages from yesterday.I’d just like to know the "why" behind it.
adsense code is on the page: http://twitter.com/sugarrae/statuses/888566067just not viewable
awesome find Sugarrae. I would be super mad if I was that Lipo company...
xDFuNK what exactly are you seeing? Cause I have viewed the source of a bunch of the non cached ones, including the one you linked to, and don’t see any adsense code?
That said, i haven’t viewed the regular page giving off googlebot as my user agent...
xDFuNK is right... code is there no matter what if you’re not logged into twitter - however, it only is VISIBLE to the end user if the end user is Googlebot (and thus why it shows in the cache): http://www.sugarrae.com/is-twitter-cloaking-their-site-to-show-adsense-ads-in-their-cache/
>code is there no matter what if you’re not logged into twitterI’d swear it wasn’t there this morning. I looked for that myself through the source code and just found an empty space. Edit: Ah sorry was being slow. I see what you mean. If you’re logged into Twitter you don’t get the Ads.
This is probably part of the same type of ad system that sites like wordpress.com and others use to only show ads to visitors that access the site via search. For example there is a Wordpress plugin that is designed for Wordpress MU only that shows adsence ads to visiters that 1. have never been to the site before and 2. get there through a search engine like Google. Given the fact that they are cloaking except to a Google bot tells me that they are trying to implement the same type of system, its just that we aren’t aware of it because we don’t fall into either category.
I just tested the above theory by clearing my browser history and cache, and then searching for a twitter page through google. And unfornately I didn’t see any ads, which means that my theory might be wrong. However, i am going to keep testing...
Ok think I’ve got this now. This isn’t about cloaking, as xDFuNK discovered, it’s about showing different content to logged in users (no ads). It just happens that Google/Yahoo and other spiders see the same logged out state (ads shown) because they are also unable to login. Why do the ads show in Google’s cache? It’s a display issue caused by the extra META content tag that Google inserts into the top of the page there. You could even say this is a display error, as Google’s code makes the page non-compliant. The first thing on the page should be the DOCTYPE declaration but Google injects their meta tag and header divs above that. [meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII"] Twitter aren’t doing anything in particular for Google. I don’t even think it counts as cloaking by their own definition. It’s just a combination of trying to stop ads being shown to users and Google inserted cache code (which makes the page non-compliant). As Halfdeck says though, this is a good case why companies should be hiring SEOs. Any consultant worth his money would have raised questions once they knew about Twitter’s plan to selectively show the advertising. So the only question left is why have the advert code in there but not show it visibly on the page? My guess is that they tried the adverts in there, had the public backlash and told the devs to stop them being shown. Instead of removing the code, the devs just changed the CSS to hide them, probably thinking this idea would be reactivated sometime later.
@NickWilsdon I think you are very close to the answer, but as a developer it just doesn’t make sence to me for them to hide it by changing the CSS. I mean, that still leaves massive potential for different issues to arrise later. And, in theory it makes each page load slower for loading unused code. It just seems that they would take it out completely. But at the same time, I feel like I have tested this under all possible senarios and I haven’t seen any ad outside the Google cache.
Invalid XHTML on the page too.... http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fsugarrae%2Fstatuses%2F888566067&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&sphinnnull=
@joehall Here’s a test page with the Google’s extra meta tag inserted (in same way as their cache template). http://nickwilsdon.com/test-twitter.html I agree though, it does seem odd to hide the ads rather than remove them. Like I said though, maybe they knew this was a test soon to be repeated. Twitter must be keen to monetize their content to have run the test in the first place. Maybe someone thought they would save some time or didn’t realise the implications? Still I can’t see Google coming down on them for this. They can claim they were trying to improve the experience for their users by removing the ads. This doesn’t seem malicious.
You know, the funny thing here is that if Twitter *do* get a penalty for displaying the ads, it will be due to invalid markup. Admittedly it’s probably Google’s poor markup at fault but would be a great case for making sites W3C compliant. :-D
I can hear it now, TWITTER: "Hey Google, we were only trying to remove your ad content to improve our user’s expierirnce,.....no, no..its not that!...they love your ads! hell, everyone loves your ads,....its just that well....umm....please don’t hurt our results!"
"I think you are very close to the answer, but as a developer it just doesn’t make sence to me for them to hide it by changing the CSS. I mean, that still leaves massive potential for different issues to arrise later."But, assuming that you’ve had to make adjustments to a major website while it is live, some things don’t turn out the way you’d like at the end of your work session.. and I could just see a developer trying to create or manage a process, hitting a snag, and instead of erasing all of his work [s]he’d just quickly cover it up until they could figure out the snag. Depending on the circumstances, it could take days or even weeks. Not saying it’s right and certainly not saying anything about the developers themselves, but I could definitely see it.