Google AdSense Policy Changes

Google has just announced changes to the AdSense policies. Some of the changes are merely superfluous - they made the policy page more navigable to make it easier to find information on what is and is not acceptable. The major changes and clarifications are outlined below:

• Google Brand Violations: This policy has always existed in our Terms and Conditions, but we have now brought directly to the "Ad Placement" of the page so that it is easier to find. Under this policy, we do not allow ads or boxes to be placed on pages that Google deviation logos, trademarks, brands or other characteristics of the content of the page or URL, which could lead users to think that the page associated with Google.
• Encouraging Clicks: We clarified this policy a bit in 'Encouraging clicks "of the program - the ads can not be formatted so that makes them indistinguishable from other contents of the page where they appear. This includes, for example, the formatting of content for mimic the ads, ads with aligning images, and placing ads in a misleading.
• Placement of ads in email and email programs: This update policy specifies that the Google ads, search boxes, and search results may not be placed in e-mails, and the par-mails.
• Other Google products policies: With this new policy, publishers are not permitted to place ads, search boxes, or search results, within, or with other Google products in a manner that violates the policies of the other product or service. For example, this includes placing ads on sites that allow users to download videos from YouTube, which is not permitted by the Terms of Service YouTube.

If you ask why it is important, it is because the AdSense program policies are officially part of the AdSense terms and conditions. They are official policies that AdSense publishers must adhere to and follow. As AdSense publishers, it is of utmost importance to stay abreast of policy changes, or risk losing your account and/or unpaid earnings.

Revisiting AdSense

I've been gone from my blogs for awhile, and have decided to renew my interest in them. Why? Because although I haven't been posting I've been earning some decent money from AdSense with the old posts I've got out there. One of the first things I did, and I suggest you do as well, is check my templates to make sure their optimized for search engines. Mostly, what I mean by this is that my keywords have no spaces after the commas and to use root words instead of their protracted versions, such as 'blog' in lieu of 'blogs.' Imagine my surprise to realize that the majority of my blogs didn't even have description and keyword meta tags! Which obviously leads to a great post about why you should have them.

Basically what I did was go into the html template and insert just after the /title tag
< content="MY BLOGS DESCRIPTION" name="description">
< content="YOUR,BLOGS,KEYWORDS" name="keywords">
Obviously, you'll want to replace the capitalized text with your relevant description and keywords. For the description, I just copy and paste the original text description I've already written for the blogs header. From this description I extract the relevant keywords that apply to this blog, again, using the root words, separated by commas with no spaces. To get a better idea about what I'm talking about go into your browsers tool bar and select 'view source' under the 'view' tab.

The most important aspect of your blog is the title. Make sure it contains your most important keyword that people will be using in their search. For this blog it would be 'AdSense' with a secondary key phrase of 'Getting Started.' The second most important aspect of your blog is fresh content. I don't mean posting every day, though consistently updated blogs are supposed to score higher than abandoned blogs, but that the content is all original and hand written. Trust me, you're way better off hand writing one blog than using scraped or borrowed content on a hundred blogs. Google is smart and they check content against everything else out there. If it's used elsewhere then it ain't nothing new, so why should they point to it again and again? Behind the content, are the keywords, followed by the description. The description is used as a default to define your blog, site, or page. Thus, they help, but not as much as a lot of people think. But in this game, it's all about numbers and if you can get that placement 1 or 2 slots above your competition on a search for your keyword on google, then you'll see a vastly improved number of hits than otherwise.

Up until now, the blogs I've written have been mostly about the content selling the AdSense, with some secondary advertising for other affiliate programs like Amazon. I've decided to branch out and use other affiliate programs as the basis for my writing with AdSense being secondary to the content. The hard part about this is avoiding the temptation of using all that content the affiliates have already written. You can still use it as a basis, but you'll want to rewrite every single sentence! I've found it's easier to read through what they've written to get an idea of what the product offers or features, then closing that page and writing my own.

OK that's enough for now, I've got work to do to update these blogs, and I hope you'll see much more from me from here on out.

A Better Search Box

In a way I'm reversing what I said in my previous post. After consideration, I've decided that a page optimized for AdSense should not make use of the technorati search box. Their search box takes you to their site where the search results display other blogs from their index. If you're building a regular site or blog this is a useful function, however for an AdSense optimized blog or site you want to narrow down the avenues for people to leave your site for another.

This is why I recommend using the search box widget at beautifulbeta. When you go to the site, the box is in the upper right and just under it, it says "add this widget to your blog". Click the link and it will take you to a widgets page. Simply click the widget and you will be prompted to log into your blogger / blogspot account. If you get an error, simply click "Back" and try it again. For some reason (for me at least) it doesn't take the first time.

I'm not sure if it'll work for non-blogger/blogspot users but heres the code and you can try it and see:

<form id="searchthis" action="/search" style="display: inline;"
method="get"><input id="search-box" name="q" type="text"><input
id="search-btn"value="Go!" type="submit"></form>

So now you still have a search box, only its providing results just from your pages where the searcher will be exposed to your AdSense ads. I still recommend listing your blog on technorati so simply log in and edit to remove their search box. Once again, many thanks to Hans at BeautifulBeta. Visit his site, for lots of nifty hacks and widgets to add more flair to your blogs.

Add Your Blog to Technorati

Just a quick post today. I wanted to talk about adding your blog to Technorati. This is super-easy to do and adds more functionality to your pages. By going to the site, you complete a simple registration and then claim your blogs. I chose to claim my blog by inserting a simple string of javascript code they provide into my template. You can do this by adding it directly into the html, but I found it easier to insert as an html page element, then I could easily move it around to find what best works for me.

Not only does this help your pages get noticed (and more traffic >> more AdSense ad exposure >> more AdSense clicks!), but if you have the "notify weblogs" checked in blogger, your new posts are automatically added. Additionally, by going to technorati you can customize the widget displayed on your pages without ever mucking with the code embedded in your page again. For instance, I chose to use the widget to display a search box and a "Blogs that link here" link for added fuctionality. I chose to not display a link to my profile because frankly a couple of my blogs require a complete over-haul and are a bit of an embarrassment (read: what I'll be doing for the rest of the day!), but I can easily add the link once the over-haul's are complete.

Play around with it and see if it doesn't add more flavor to your site and hopefully bring in more revenue too!

Adding Social Bookmarking Widgets to Blogger

'K, I've been looking for an easy way to add the social bookmarking widgets to my blogs and I think I've found it. Why is this important? If people find your blog which you've made useful and informative they may want to share it with others, so why not make it easier for them? Remember more visitors = more traffic = more AdSense clicks.

The site is here (Many thanks to Hans at BeautifulBeta!) but I'll give it the rundown here and try to clear up some parts I thought could have been a bit clearer (the purpose of this site, after all, is for you to learn from my trial and error!)

1. Go to your blog's template tab and click "edit HTML"

a. Download your template just in case you want to change it back or have problems. I didn't, but it's still a good idea.

b. Check "expand widgets" box.

2. Scroll down and find your .post img { } settings. It'll look something like this:

.post img {
padding:4px;
border:1px solid #cde;
}

You'll want to replace the border settings (between the colon and semicolon) to "0" or you'll have a border around each icon. Unfortunately, this also removes the borders from all your images in your post. (At the site they mention another way using a bookmarks css, but I have no idea how to do that yet. If I figure it out I'll update this post.)

Anyhoo, the .post img should now look like this:

.post img {
padding:4px;
border:0;
}

3. Place the following js within the head (I chose to place it just before the /head tag):

<script src='http://home.planet.nl/~hansoosting/downloads/beautifulbeta.js' type='text/javascript'/>

4. Continue to scroll down looking for:

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'/>

(For some reason I had problems finding it when scrolling upwards from the bottom, and no problem at all when scrolling down, maybe just a perceptual quirk). Replace it with the code found here (Right click and save as .txt and open in notepad to cut and paste into your template).

That's it, you've just added social bookmarking widgets to all your posts!

Again, many cool-points to Hans at BeautifulBeta!