In this paper we study ruled surfaces which appear as an exceptional surface in a succession of blowing-ups. In particular we prove that the $e$-invariant of such a ruled exceptional surface $E$ is strictly positive whenever its intersection with the other exceptional surfaces does not contain a fiber (of $E$). This fact immediately enables us to resolve an open problem concerning an intersection configuration on such a ruled exceptional surface consisting of three nonintersecting sections. In the second part of the paper we apply the non-vanishing of $e$ to the study of the poles of the well-known topological, Hodge and motivic zeta functions.

Let $X$ be a nonsingular algebraic variety in characteristic zero. To an effective divisor on $X$ Kontsevich has associated a certain motivic integral, living in a completion of the Grothendieck ring of algebraic varieties. He used this invariant to show that birational (smooth, projective) Calabi-Yau varieties have the same Hodge numbers. Then Denef and Loeser introduced the invariant {\it motivic (Igusa) zeta function}, associated to a regular function on $X$, which specializes to both the classical $p$-adic Igusa zeta function and the topological zeta function, and also to Kontsevich's invariant. This paper treats a generalization to singular varieties. Batyrev already considered such a `Kontsevich invariant' for log terminal varieties (on the level of Hodge polynomials of varieties instead of in the Grothendieck ring), and previously we introduced a motivic zeta function on normal surface germs. Here on any $\bbQ$-Gorenstein variety $X$ we associate a motivic zeta function and a `Kontsevich invariant' to effective $\bbQ$-Cartier divisors on $X$ whose support contains the singular locus of~$X$.