Unofficial Google Products Help Centre

At 6 pm PST tonight (11/30), our engineers will be performing site maintenance for approximately 15 minutes. You won't be able to log in to your account during this short period, but rest assured that your ads and your reporting won't be affected. We apologize for the short notice -- hopefully this will give you an extra 15 minutes to do some more online holiday shopping . Thanks for your patience! Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

As you might know from our Payments Guide , one of the steps to getting paid is submitting your tax information. We've recently updated the Tax Information page located under your My Account tab with a new format that we hope will make it easier to determine which form is right for you. Also, you'll now be able to see when your information was last saved so that you can make sure all updates have been recorded in our system. Every publisher's tax situation is different, but we aren't able to provide any tax advice. To help determine what's right for you, we recommend walking through the tax wizard in your account or visiting our Help Center for additional help. If you're not able to find the information you're looking for, we encourage you to speak directly with your local tax advisor. Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support

We've heard it time and time again: as publishers, you want to give your users a relevant search experience on your websites. You want the power of Google search, and you want to make it your own. And then, of course, you want to make money from this search engine, not spend time and money building it. Well, here's news you can use -- now you can do all this with Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE). With CSE, you can create a highly customized and (free) tailored search experience for your users that reflects your knowledge and expertise. You place this search engine on your site and, if you've got an AdSense for search account, you can link your CSE to it and make money from the resulting traffic. In a few simple steps you can create a CSE that looks and feels like your own, prioritizes or restricts content based on what you specify, as well as open your search engine index to trusted members of your community so they can contribute to its comprehensiveness and relev

We'd like to wish our U.S. publishers a Happy Thanksgiving. We'll be out of the office sleeping off the tryptophan until Monday, so it may take us longer to reply to your emails. In the meantime, please feel free to visit our Help Center or discuss your questions with other publishers on our Help Forum . (Turkey artwork courtesy of Suzie Dewey) Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

When your AdSense account reaches US $50, keep your eyes peeled for a PIN in the post. Before we can send you a payment, we'll send you a PIN. Your PIN is short for your Personal Identification Number, and it's your key to verifying your AdSense account so that you can receive payments. Once you've entered your PIN in your account and your account balance reaches US $100, you'll be all clear for payment, provided you've removed all other holds from your account. If you've reached US $50 in earnings, you can check when your PIN was generated by visiting your Payment History page and clicking the Please enter your PIN link. PINs are typically mailed 3-5 days after they're generated. They're sent by standard mail and usually take between 2-4 weeks to arrive. Make sure you know what to watch for in the mail by taking a moment to study the example PIN mailer below. PINs are printed in postcard-sized envelopes with a Google logo. If we've already sent y

Are you having difficulty implementing the AdSense code using your web editor? Would you like to integrate AdSense into your Blogspot or Page Creator site ? If so, then we're happy to let you know about our new Activation Demo . In this demo, we'll walk you through implementing AdSense using three common methods, including one where you won't need to copy or paste the ad code. If you're using a web editor that offers one of these methods, you can follow along. If not, you can create a new site using Blogger or Google Page Creator - the process is fast, easy, and free. UPDATED link to demo Posted by David Jones - AdSense Publisher Support

It's an oft-seen question from publishers: Are we earning revenue for ad impressions or for ad clicks? The answer is that it depends on whether cost-per-impression (CPM) ads or cost-per-click (CPC) ads are appearing on your pages. By default, CPC ads will show on your site and you'll generate earnings for valid clicks on those ads. However, your ad units will display CPM ads when advertisers bid specifically on your site using site targeting , and for those ads you'll generate earnings with each valid impression. Please keep in mind that CPM earnings are not the same as the values you see in your eCPM column; your eCPM is only a reporting feature that can help you compare ad performance . To determine which type of ad you displayed on specific days, you can follow these instructions to generate a report. In your Advanced Reports, the ad type 'Site' refers to CPM ads, and 'Contextual' refers to CPC ads. Want to show more CPM ads on your site? It's not po

What could be more exciting than the sights and sounds of Las Vegas? Meeting our publishers in person, of course! A few of us from AdSense are excited to be at WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006 in Las Vegas this week on November 15 and 16. Stop by the Google booth to meet a few seasoned optimization specialists who'll be happy to give you insights into how to better optimize AdSense on your pages as well as answer any burning questions you may have. In addition, an AdSense Product Manager will be on hand at Safe Bets From Google eagerly awaiting to hear what features you want from AdSense, or take any other feedback about the program. And if that isn't enough, one of our very own will be presenting on Wednesday's contextual advertising optimization panel . For those of you who'll be going, we wish you smooth travel to the City of Lights and hope to meet you there. Posted by Christine Lee - AdSense Product Marketing

This Saturday, November 11th, our engineers will be performing routine system maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. Although you won't be able to access your account during this time, ads will still be served to your pages and we'll continue to track your earnings as normal. While we know it will be hard to drag yourself away from your account for 4 hours, maybe this will give you a chance to clear away those cobwebs you told friends were "Halloween decorations." Take your pal Jack O. Lantern for a visit to that new neighborhood hot spot, the compost heap. When you've eradicated all the ghouls and goblins from your home, gear up for the next celebration by doing a quick search for turkey recipes (or Tofurky recipes , if you prefer). And thanks for your patience! Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Did you receive a revenue boost through referrals ? The referrals team is looking for publishers to participate in a case study, and we want to hear from you. Have you increased your AdSense earnings this way? It doesn't matter which products you're promoting on your site, or how long you've been a publisher. Feel free to send us an email and tell us about your success. Posted by Laura Chen - AdSense Publisher Support

We know that you’ve worked hard to create quality content for your sites, and that you look for the same quality in the ads you’re displaying. That’s why we’re happy to let you know about a change in AdWords that will improve the quality of ads. Recently, we have begun incorporating the quality of an ad's landing page into the determination of what ads appear on your site. The quality of the ad's landing page now affects the Quality Score that the ad receives -- this score helps to determine the amount an advertiser must bid to appear on your site. The lower the Quality Score, the more "expensive" it is for the advertiser to show up on your site. As a result, you should see fewer ads on your pages which lead to low-quality sites. And what defines low quality? We've published a general set of landing page and site guidelines . We encourage advertisers to offer relevant, substantial content so that visitors can find what they are looking for when they click on ads.

As you might already know, a great way to increase your AdSense earnings is to place multiple ad units on webpages that are rich with content. Here's a way to maximize your revenue with multiple ad units: Make sure the ad unit with the highest CTR is the first ad unit in the HTML code of your page. We've heard that there may be some confusion on this, so here's some clarification on how we serve ads to a page once we know which ads win the auction. Currently, the first ad unit on a page always shows the top ads that win the ad auction. Also, if there aren't enough ads in our ad inventory to fill all of the ad units on a page, the first ad unit on the page will display ads first. This is why I recommend using custom channels to determine which of your ad units has the highest CTR, and then placing that ad unit first in the HTML code. For the purposes of this post, the first ad unit on the page is defined as the first instance of the ad code within the HTML of the pa