Great deal for advertisers. Some content sites are fairly mixed, with a limited number of pages being relevant for a particular product or business model.

Site targeting places your ads on individual sites in the Google content network. Site sections take that one step further by placing your ads on only one section or even one page of a site. If you sell soccer shoes, for instance, you might choose to advertise only on the sports section of a news site rather than placing ads across the entire site.

Select a site section by entering its URL in the AdWords site tool or in the 'Edit Sites and CPM' section of your account. If the full site is example.com, the section URL will take the form example.com/section. You may target individual pages by using the form example.com/section/page. Refer to the URL of the actual site to see how its sections are named. Source

If a site ranks where you want to be seen you can target ads at that specific page. Absolutely wonderful for marketing a product against an old competing one.

A while ago I also mentioned that if these page targeted ads were far underpriced some webmasters may be inclined to spam for authority sites to get the ads they place on them a bit more exposure. The ad market really is opening up :)

A great SEO tool that needs to be made is one that searches the search engines for desirable keyword terms and returns the result pages which offer AdSense ads on them.

I would imagine it also would not be hard to automate adding those pages to an AdWords account, and automate building a bit of link popularity for them.

So Nandini launched her blog network recently, with 46 channels launched all at once. She is a friend of mine, and I want to see her do well, which is a large part of the reason I was disappointed in her launching so many channels at once.

At ThreadWatch they noticed one of the posts on one of her blogs was verbatim plagiarism. There are a ton of lazy writers, and that problem is far more common than most people would think. Nandini probably had nothing to do directly with that copied post, but she is going to be treated as though she did since it is her network.

That is part of the reason to start slow and small...so you can learn from what feedback you get, and so that you can build trust with your writers and audience.

If I were her I would probably scale back the project to a few channels...get them going good...and then extend out. She is selling herself short overseeing that many channels at once, especially with limited history and reputation on the blog creation front.

Some people will probably continue to ride Nandini pretty hard over that post, but it is common all over the web...she just needs to scale down...build a system...and then build back up, that or hire more people to watch over the writers, but the whole blog channel thing is a game of margins...it's best if you can develop a trusting relationship directly with each author.

A big problem on the web is trying to do too much too quick. Most content projects start off slow and small and work their way up to being great.

It may be good to have a variety of sites to be able to learn from, but it is best to have a few channels that are great, which you can collect feedback from, and then learn how to make the next channels better from what you learned off the first ones.

Generally she has been rather receptive to the rather harsh criticism some bloggers have given her, so on that front it may help her still end up doing OK out of the deal. Her network has decent link popularity for being less than a week old.

So Weblogs Inc. just cashed out. Cool for them. Am sure they made some sweet cash, but most of that cash probably will not be seen by the average blogger in their network.

So what does the average blogger get out of the deal? Probably a little more pay and a lot more restrictions.

Sure AOL wanted to buy them, but that is because Weblogs Inc. had first mover advantage. AOL might be for sale, and even if they are not, they still are looking to become once again relevant. This was a small investment if it convinces a few people that they are relevant.

The first company who buys a blog network gets all the surrounding buzz & media coverage. The raw linkage data surrounding that network and that story probably has millions of dollars of value. To a company worth around $80 billion a $20 million dollar spend (or so) is not much.

Over time what will AOL do with the various channels? Some channels will be exceptionally profitable, while others lose money. Will AOL do like About.com once did and chop the channels that lack profitablility? Will new policies cause ego conflicts and bloggers to leave?

Most people who create blog networks are not going to be able to cash out big by selling. The reason for purchasing Weblogs Inc. was due more to market timing than being a blog network.

Some people can try to go big, but I am not so sure scale beats quality. I think John Battelle's idea of keeping the advertising network separate to the publisher is huge. The only reason you need to lock a person in is if you are afraid you do not offer enough value to keep them.

Think of how many times Jason Calcanis crowed on about how much money they were making and how they never advertised. All of those channels & around 100+ bloggers and they were doing about $2,000 dollars a day in AdSense.

Consider that Darrin Rowse has only a few partners and is making over a $1,000 a day in AdSense and Chitika earnings. On a per blogger basis that is WAY more profit.

Nandini just launched a blog network, and bloggers are riding her hard (but at least she is hopefully getting a few links out of all that hate they are spewing her way).

I understand the idea of having a few sites to diversify your revenue stream, but longterm I think most blogs are going to have to stand on their own. Sure a few random gaming blogs may be able to make great profit riding on the backs of popular blogs in a network, but most of the blogs themselves are going to need to be citation worthy.

I just don't see how the networks can provide enough value to be worth giving up all your content for, at least not if you care about your topic and want to work on the web full time.

disclaimer: When I launch a blog network I will erase this post ;)

MSN apparently is in a fight with Google for the solar system, and is looking for spaceship pilots...or maybe just people to test their soon to be launching ad system. Hey, you got to start somewhere.

Anywho, Oilman thinks you should check them out.

Some marketers hide their motives well. I am no good at that, so I try to be fairly open about most things.

One thing that is hard about being a really open SEO is that if you do come across great ideas and openly share them then they lose their value quickly.

In my ebook I state things like "write testimonials for quality linkage data." And then I get people who want to write a testimonial about my stuff and then are pissed if I do not give them a link. I don't want inauthentic testimonials on my site...and a link is worth more than $79 in some industries. Sometimes it is hard to be really open without pissing people off.

A while ago I also advocated on topic blog comments and then some people would read my ebook and use my site as a sitemap for their site with various me too type posts. Again acting mad when I did not approve.

One guy wanted a discount on my ebook. I don't normally do that, but I told him yes. I had him donate it to the Red Cross and then gave him a copy of my ebook. Later the guy told me how great his conversion rate is and he wanted to hire me to do SEO on his site. I told him to go to hell. I am not going to work for clients that think they deserve a discount for no reason...those are almost always the worst customers. He wanted me to refer him to someone else and I told him he was out of luck. That is just how it goes.

I bought a link off a website, and since I loved the site I gave the webmaster a free copy of my ebook. He soon increased the price of links on his site 400%.

Long ago I mentioned that some SEO should probably put together a meta search engine to build links. Nobody did, and less than a month after I did the site had over 1,000 backlinks.

I created that meta search engine for four main reasons:

• I wanted to create a quick market research tool. Once it was made there was little extra effort to make it a full feature meta search engine. When Google was originally created they wanted to find out what links were most important, and then noticed that it was pretty relevant when they created a search engine using PageRank + page title.

• Most meta search engines are cluttered with ads to the point that serious voices on search recommend not even using them
• cheap & easy link popularity - I am betting I could get a large number of the right types of authoritative well trusted sites to link at my meta search site without much effort.
• extend brand / image - I do not see this field as being one which has longevity for a large number of the participants. Those people who are really good with algorithms will do good for a while, but more and more it seems to me that the people who find ways to become synonymous with search will do better in the search marketing sphere. Search is such a loved topic and search marketing is such a hated one.

Does me saying all of that make the tool any less remarkable or worthwhile? What quality content or quality websites are created without some sort of agenda or goal?

Can marketers be too transparent? At what point does it help? When does it hurt? How do you know where to draw the line? What markets are good to be transparent in? Which ones are bad? What are some good & bad examples of marketing transparency?