Carrying on down the idea that its good practice to make those ads stand out as the best option for your visitor to click on I have done many sites where i limit the colour on the page to only being the ad. The links are hidden, the page text is grey and the ads are black and blue, the classic recipe to see your CTR soar!

Heres an example image I just knocked up: -

[photopress:greyscalesite.jpg,full,pp_image]

Update – for Keemo – heres the source code for the above
<code>

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
body {
color: #999999;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 9px;
background-color: #666666;
}
a:link {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:active {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
.style1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #FFFFFF;
}
.style2 {font-size: 9px}
td {
font-size: 11px;
}
–>
</style>

<table width=”800″ border=”0″ align=”center” cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”1″ bgcolor=”#333333″>
<tr>
<td bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”><table width=”100%” border=”0″ align=”center” cellpadding=”6″ cellspacing=”6″>
<tr bgcolor=”#CCCCCC”>
<td height=”80″ colspan=”2″><div align=”right”>
<h1 class=”style1″>Burglar Alarms </h1>
</div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width=”300″ align=”center” valign=”top”>SHOVE 1 ADSENSE AD HERE</td>
<td width=”458″ height=”774″ valign=”top”>Burglar (or intrusion), fire and safety alarms are found in electronic form today. Sensors are connected to a control unit via either a low-voltage hardwire or narrowband RF signal, which is used to interact with a response device. The most common security sensors indicate the opening of a door or window or detect motion via passive infrared (PIR). In new construction systems are predominately hardwired for economy while in retrofits wireless systems may be more economical and certainly quicker to install. Some systems are dedicated to one mission, others handle fire, intrusion, and safety alarms simultaneously. Sophistication ranges from small, self-contained noisemakers, to complicated, multi-zoned systems with color-coded computer monitor outputs. Many of these concepts also apply to portable alarms for protecting cars, trucks or other vehicles and their contents (i.e., “car alarms”). See also fire alarm control panel for specific fire system issues. Burglar alarms are sometimes referred to as alarm systems, see burglar alarm control panel for a discussion of hard-wired burglar alarm system design.<br>
Burglar (or intrusion), fire and safety alarms are found in electronic form today.
<p>Sensors are connected to a control unit via either a low-voltage hardwire or narrowband RF signal, which is used to interact with a response device. The most common security sensors indicate the opening of a door or window or detect motion via passive infrared (PIR). In new construction systems are predominately hardwired for economy while in retrofits wireless systems may be more economical and certainly quicker to install. Some systems are dedicated to one mission, others handle fire, intrusion, and safety alarms simultaneously. Sophistication ranges from small, self-contained noisemakers, to complicated, multi-zoned systems with color-coded computer monitor outputs. Many of these concepts also apply to portable alarms for protecting cars, trucks or other vehicles and their contents (i.e., “car alarms”). See also fire alarm control panel for specific fire system issues. Burglar alarms are sometimes referred to as alarm systems, see burglar alarm control panel for a discussion of hard-wired burglar alarm system design.</p></td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor=”#EAEAEA”>
<td height=”40″ colspan=”2″><div align=”right” class=”style2″>Blah Blah</div></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
</tr>
</table>

</code>

Ok so when you build or generate a page for Adsense and only for Adsense whats the aim of the page?

Click ! – Yup thats right you need the visitor to click and fuck off as soon as possible, whilst they are browsing they are eating bandwidth and the risk of them finding something useful to read is increasing.

Whats the best way to make sure that happens whilst remaining legal? What I do is make sure that my links arent easy to spot and i make sure that the ads are the brightest thing on the page.

More about making the ads stand out soon and more about making the page as dull as possible too but today we are just going to make the links dissapear via css.

I dont add navigation links in a list, mine are often just in the middle of the content and look like another paragraph of content. Heres the css I use to make them dissapear: -

<code>
<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
body {
color: #666666;
}
a:link {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:active {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
–>
</style>
</code>

More on why the text isnt black its dark grey another day but all your links have faded into the general content and your click happy visitor will be reading those ads with their finger on the money button

The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers. The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001. The firm uses “off-the-shelf” drives to store cached web pages and services. “Our data indicate a much weaker correlation between utilisation levels and failures than previous work has suggested,” the authors noted.

When creating sites on a large scale you have to be sure that you dont make life easy for anyone looking to track you down or to ban your entire network. So it is important that you dont leave any footprints.

I have talked with people who change their template on each batch of sites they do – to be honest I never did, I simply changed em once in a while.

What really gets me though is when people use a publically available system and dont even bother to change the default templates it comes with. Some people also make a simple error here too, they see the structure of the site in visual terms rather than in coding terms. They simply look at the css and alter it to give the site a different look. Dont get me wrong you can make sites look completely different using just the css but remember one thing.

THE SPIDER SEES THE CODE NOT THE PAGE

So altering the css and leaving the divs and page structure as is means from the spiders point of view its the same as the default page, stupid move eh?

Even when I am doing wordpress templates I change the layout structure from css to tables so suddenly from a search engines point of view its not a simple wordpress blog its a normal yet unique website.

Think people think!

Edit: THIS IMAGE IS OF ESRUN – HE MADE ME POST IT IN PLACE OF HOMER

[photopress:Photo_74.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

Apple Windows Mobile iPhone Theme, originally uploaded by TheAgencyBlog.com.

Apple are reportedly sending cease and desist letters out to bloggers who post this photo. Its a picture of a windows mobile skin someone created to look like the new iPhone.

I can understand if they want to stop the skin maker but anyone who even talks about it? Isnt this the same company who did the 1984 style adverts in the eighties? Now they are acting like the oppressive state.