There is a saying:  “The Truth shall set you free”, but even truer to the point
is that honesty will not only set you free; it will sustain you. I have a
beautiful apple tree outside of my kitchen window in my backyard, and it is a
constant reminder of this fact.  

From the beginning of time, apples have been associated with love, beauty, luck,
health, comfort, pleasure, wisdom, temptation, sensuality, sexuality, virility
and fertility. It doesn’t matter what period of time or which culture, the
themes always come down to these. The apple tree signifies the Tree of Life, and
in Greek myth, the apple tree is a symbol of abundance.  

Year after year, without fail, my little apple tree in my backyard turns white
in Spring with fragrant flowers and then yields many basketsful of late summer
apples.  They are green with rosy cheeks and taste like a burst of tart sunshine
in your mouth when you take a bite. This little tree weathers storms and still
gives off this bountiful harvest of fruit. My children and their friends can go
and pick apples while playing in the yard, and I feel so rich when I go and pick
my apples;  I love creating recipes with them for us to enjoy.  Cooking with
them give me added incentive to actually use many of the various condiments and
spices that I have in my cupboard and the potted herbs in my garden that I
otherwise might not have used.  They generally make cooking quite a joy this
time of year.

In the fall, I picked a number of small apples and began cutting and one of them had a
slight mark on the peeling.  When I cut into it, I discovered a live insect
inside of the apple, which was entirely rotten.  Of course, on seeing this, I
immediately ran outside and threw it away.  I didn’t even put
my shoes on to do it. Neither the apple nor the insect was evil, even though I
reacted to it in total disgust, but the apple was spoiled rotten, through and
through.  Had I kept the apples together with the one rotten one, even for just
a day or two, the rest of the apples would have become “infected” and rotted
very quickly, too.

Well just suppose that you had a barrel of apples, and you had this one apple in
it.  After not too long, the entire barrel would become rotten; very few apples
would escape this.  More of these insects, and perhaps even others, would be
attracted to this barrel, and it would be far too much work to pick out the good
parts of each and every apple.  So you would have to throw away the ENTIRE
BARREL OF APPLES.

Google is in the process of doing just that.  Google calls itself: “The Content
Network”, but there have been a lot of junky sites - many sites with poor
content that were created solely to create AdSense income.
Google wants us to have very good content and sites that are useful for the visitor.
They have changed the rules for AdSense and AdWords, and in July and
August, many sites simply disappeared. Some analysts are saying that if you have
500 websites in a network and just one of them has poor content, then all 500 will be
removed. So you have to build trust with Google and it’s search engines.
Regardless of what area you are in, if you are on the Internet, you cannot
afford to ignore what happens with AdWords, AdSense and what Google decides to
do with it. And what Google does, the other players aren’t far behind.

Some advertisers have complained  that recent changes to the Adwords advertising
system are sending PPC (pay per click) budgets sky-high. The changes implemented
by Google include an unknown “quality rating” factor, which directly affects bid
prices.

Where Google feels the page the ad leads to is of relatively poor “quality”, the
bid price rises for keywords used to advertise that page.  A specific reason for
the policy is almost certainly to help remove bottom-end affiliate bidders, as
well as those using “arbitrage” - bidding on low-cost AdWords keywords, to send
traffic to pages publishing AdSense for higher-paying keywords.
The impact has been variable, with some affiliates reporting a huge increase in
prices, while users of arbitrage have reported little overall impact. One
UK-based firm that helps people sell goods on e-Bay are reporting that average
click costs have risen by almost 2,000% in just one week.
However, the most important change is how it will affect general e-commerce site
budgets, and at present it’s difficult to get a balanced report on what effect
it is having.

Some e-commerce sites are reporting suddenly inflated budgets, others are
reporting no change. While any change to the quality of the AdWords service is likely to be welcomed
overall by advertisers, the concern at present is that the lack of transparency
in the AdWords “quality” rating system may be hurting some advertisers
unnecessarily.  But Google, which is now a public company with shareholders, has
to keep the advertisers happy - they account for about 97% of their revenues,
and so Google must be considered as a partner and must be respected as such.
 
What is Quality and Trust with Google?  Landing page guidelines:  privacy policy
and a privacy page.  Opt-In page - disclose how you are going to protect this
information.  Content on the page related to the ad-copy - quality links and
quality content. They want to see additional content pages and four or five
links to other content pages within the same theme.  Google was a page based
system but now it is a site-based system.  Sites must be based on THEMES and not
on keywords.  A squeeze page (lead-capturing landing page) without the above
will not pass with Google as an AdSense/Adword page.

Remember what happened with the banners?  People stopped seeing them; they
ignored them.  After a long rest from them, banners are on the way back again now.
What happens when Internet users stop trusting Google because of too many sites
with poor content? People will go elsewhere until they fix the problem.

Remembering that there is no absolute Truth; what is true for me may be a lie
for someone else, so honesty - personal honesty in everything we do is what will
free us from our limitations.  No more illusions, just seeing the plain, honest
truth as we perceive it, taking care to guard our reputation and to provide value in
everything we do, and good content will follow.

Angela Wickenberg