Unofficial Google Products Help Centre

Following our recent series of referrals announcements, we're happy to announce that you can now earn $5 per referral for Google Apps . With Google Apps, we've taken Google's most powerful communication and collaboration tools, and packaged them together so businesses, schools and other organizations can work more effectively while spending less time and money on IT systems. Google Apps provides customized email addresses (powered by Gmail), Google Calendar, Google Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets and Page Creator, all for free. Best of all, everything is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain. So how do these referrals work? Just visit the AdSense Setup tab in your AdSense account and click the link for Referrals . Select the Google Apps option and then choose how you want the referral ad to look on your site. (The Google Apps referral ads are available in English right now, but we'll be adding more languages soon.) C...

Today we're excited to announce that in addition to AdSense, AdWords, Firefox with Google Toolbar, and Google Pack, you can now refer your users to Google Checkout through AdSense. Checkout gives your users a faster, safer, and more convenient way to shop online. OK, that sounds great for them, but what do you get out of it? Well, every time you refer a user to Google Checkout, you make a little money. It's a simple process that includes all of three steps: You place the Checkout referral button on your site. Someone clicks on the button, signs up as a buyer with Google Checkout using a valid U.S. credit card, and completes a purchase of at least $10 before shipping and tax through Checkout within 90 days. (The current $10 minimum purchase corresponds to our existing $10 promotion for new buyers, so this amount may change in the future.) You earn $1. It's that simple. Please note that Checkout referrals are currently only available for U.S. publishers, and Google Checkout...

We recently caught up with Peter Clee, a publisher who has seen success with both AdSense and AdWords. Peter's main site, LondonNet.co.uk , was launched in the summer of 1996 and offers a guide to arts, entertainment, city info, and news about London. Peter also runs www.hotelgenie.com and www.myflatincannes.com . We'd like to share some of Peter's insights with you about monetising his sites with AdSense and his experience using AdWords to attract visitors. Inside AdSense: How does AdSense impact your business? Peter Clee: It has reinforced our view that creating good, relevant content is what we, as publishers, should be all about. AdSense is a stress-free and rapid way to support new sections and features on your site, ensuring you have a degree of monetisation before you even consider additional revenue streams. If a section works well with AdSense you quickly learn it is worth investing more time and energy into expanding its content. Additionally, with future redesig...

As active web publishers, we know you're working to build quality traffic so the world can see the great content you've created. Since many of you rely on listings in search engines for this traffic, we often receive email from publishers who have concerns about their site's listing on Google.com. We'd like to let you know that to protect the integrity of our search results, your participation in AdSense won't affect your site's ranking or listing in the Google index. Since AdSense is separate from Google.com search results, our team is unable to provide publishers with any information about a site's Page Rank or status in the Google index. However, if you do have questions about your site's ranking or listing on Google.com, we encourage you to visit Webmaster Central . There, you can navigate to pages with information about how Google crawls and indexes pages, how to improve a site's ranking , or why a site is no longer visible in the index. In add...

If you're looking for an easy way to add some interactivity to your site, we've got just the tool for you. The AJAX Search Wizards allow you to add a video, news, and local search results to your web page without writing any code. Just tell us how you want the widget to display and what searches to automatically execute, and the wizard will generate the code for you to copy and paste into your web page. Our newest wizard generates a news bar that scrolls through recent news headlines. Here, we've customized it to show Google News search results for Google, Apple, and Microsoft: Take a look. The news bar is also available in a vertical orientation for you to use in a column or sidebar. You can easily change the look-and-feel of the our wizard-generated code just by adding some CSS or editing the JavaScript. Also, check out our video bar wizard to easily add Google videos to your site and try our map search wizard to add a searchable Google map to your site. The AJAX ...

Does your site have a feed? If not, you may be missing out on a substantial number of repeat visitors. An increasing number of users are using feed readers to keep up to date with their favorite websites. You've worked so hard to create that quality content, and feeds can help you grow your audience as well as let your current readers take your site with them wherever they go. Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage are examples of feed readers that allow your users to keep track of updates to your site -- and starting today, it's now possible to track the number of users subscribed to your site via these two feed readers. Here are just a few examples of AdSense sites which also offer feeds: Information resources NewsMax and Hybridcars.com publish feeds of their most recent stories. Taquitos.net, a specialty site focused on snacks, publishes feeds with the newest snack reviews . Blogs like Inside AdSense publish feeds with the latest posts . There are many reso...

If you're a participant in the AdSense Help Forum or if you read AdSense blog posts on Google Groups, you've probably noticed that Google Groups has a completely new look. But it's not just the colors and the layout that have changed; there are also a number of exciting new features you can take advantage of. First, we've added more customization options for Group owners. As the owner of a Group, you now have the ability to change the look and feel of your pages by specifying a color scheme and logo. You can also collaborate with your members by creating web pages together -- members can then view and edit the pages. In addition, Group members can interact with each other in new ways. You can now upload and share files such as photos and word documents with other members. Want to let other members know more about you? Create a profile complete with a bio, a picture, and a quote. The new version of Google Groups is available in more than a dozen languages -- visit toda...

As webmasters (and web users), you know that images can liven up text-heavy pages and help engage readers. Maybe you keep a personal blog and you'd like to share a holiday photo album. Or maybe you manage a knitting tutorial site, and you'd like to post photos with step-by-step captions. Well, Picasa Web Albums can help you do all of these things. Just upload photos to your own Picasa Web Albums page, then embed a link to that album on your site. Because your photos will be stored on a Google server, you can let us worry about hosting your files while you concentrate on creating a great looking gallery that will enrich your site. After signing up and creating a web album, simply click the Embed in Blog/MySpace link in that album. Just like with AdSense, you'll then need to copy and paste the provided HTML into your site's source code. Republish your site, and the cover photo of that album will appear on your site, already linked to your web album. When embedding your...

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 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....

Have you ever struggled to keep track of different versions of your documents or site layouts while collaborating with other webmasters? If so, you'll find Google Docs & Spreadsheets the best pain reliever ever -- it's our new web-based word processing and spreadsheet program to help manage your site's content and easily share it with others. With Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you can edit and save in HTML to create mock-ups of your webpages. You're also able to access your files from any computer via a web browser, and easily send them to collaborators to review and edit. Even more exciting, you can view all past revisions to your file, so if you change your mind about that bright purple highlighting after you've put it into your document, simply revert back to a previous version. Google Docs & Spreadsheets also provides an easy way to distribute content. Your users won't need to download anything from your site; just create your content in Docs ...

Wouldn't it be great to get your content in front of people while they're visiting Google.com or other webpages? More eyeballs on your site means more opportunities for your content to reach visitors, along with, of course, your AdSense ads. Google Gadgets enables you to do just that. Gadgets are miniature devices that offer cool, dynamic content ranging from games to news clips to weather reports to just about anything you can dream up. They've been around for a while, but their reach got a lot broader last week when we made it possible for anyone to add gadgets to their own webpages. That means you! Here's an example of a flight status tracker, for instance, that can be placed on any page on the web. You can search for free gadgets to add to your own webpages in our directory of gadgets for your webpage . To display a gadget, just pick the one you like, set your preferences, click "Get code," and copy-and-paste the HTML onto your own page. Add some 'bli...

Over the past few months, we've drawn attention to the value of video , and specifically, of embedding video on your sites. We're happy to announce that Google Video is now available for Australia ! Our Australian friends can search for the most popular videos in Australia and embed them on their own sites, all within a localized (or rather "localised") interface. Not only is there the usual treasure trove of footage uploaded by individual users already on Google Video, but the AU team has worked closely with great partners like ABC , AFTRS (the Australian Film, Television and Radio School), Channel 10 , Film Australia , Fairfax and SonyBMG . We're sure you'll find some great content amongst these partners and others to enhance your website. In addition, there are now many ways for you to customize the video player itself and the surrounding page. This way, the player is integrated with your content and will help engage your users. You can: Resize the playe...

Provide a great user experience, and the money will follow. We've found this to be true time and time again with our own products and services. For publishers like you, this starts with offering content that's meaningful to your visitors. The more you can focus on your core asset -- your site's content -- the more successful you can be with AdSense. We just launched a service that can help you spend less time, energy, and money on one of the biggest distractions for publishers: maintaining IT systems. Google Apps for Your Domain lets you offer powerful communication and collaboration tools including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk to everyone with an account on your own domain, people within your organization and/or members of your community. You can private-label the interfaces to make them your own, and best of all, everything is managed on Google's scalable, secure systems, just like AdSense. No servers to install or maintain, no spam upgrades to think about,...

I'd like to share this earth-shattering news with you: David Hasselhoff (of Knight Rider and Baywatch fame) has come out with a classic new music video that should not be missed. How did I find out about it? I saw a dynamically generated link to it from Google Related Links at the bottom of my blog. (And I've found some other gems that way that have to wait for another post.) Let me give you what the MBAs call the 8-second elevator pitch (our buildings are not very tall around here) on Google Related Links. The idea is you surf over to http://www.google.com/relatedlinks/ and start creating a Google Related Links unit for your site. You pick the color, size, and types of content (related news, videos, searches, web pages) that you want to appear in this Related Links unit, and then copy the JavaScript over to your site just as you would do for an AdSense ad unit. Google crawlers will then crawl your site, see what type of content is there, and then dynamically show links in t...

We hope you've gained insight into the various tools and products Google has to offer for increasing the visibility of your site. As Boyar promised , we’ll close out this week's theme a little differently, by sharing with you the story of a publisher who used a number of Google products to increase his site's audience 50-fold in just two months. Ryan, webmaster for TropicalYarns.com , had been using AdSense for content and AdSense for search to monetize his pages. However, he noticed that his site’s visitors consisted mainly of existing customers. Using Analytics , he was able to better understand his new and returning visitors. After pinpointing the most popular page on his site in June, he added an email newsletter sign-up form to that page and saw the subscription list grow by 20%. In just one month, he watched new visitors grow to 75% of his audience. At the same time, Ryan used AdWords to advertise his site’s offerings. After experimenting for three weeks to optimize ...

As an AdSense publisher, you've probably put a lot of effort into making your website the best it can be -- optimizing your ads, building good content, and driving high quality visits. But there's one crucial step left: to see just how effective these things are. How many visitors are you getting each day? What pages are they visiting? Where do they come from, and which keywords brought them to your site -- both from pay-per-click efforts and from natural search? Many website owners push their site live, and then leave it at that, remaining in the dark about all these questions. Google Analytics can enlighten you. We think it's much more fun to have the answers to these burning questions, and that you owe it to yourself to know for sure. After all, this is the payoff for all the hard work that's gone into creating your site. When you launch or make a change to it, there's that initial excitement of wondering who's going to check it out. And Google Analytics can...

You're an AdSense publisher, and you've got great content, but you want a) more people to know about it and b) your loyal readers to know when you post new content so they can visit your site easily -- maybe by the click of a button. By building up traffic, you can get more eyeballs on your content and of course your AdSense ads. This is where Google Toolbar comes in. There's more to Toolbar than just web search, pop-up blocking and auto-filling web forms. With the recent release of Google Toolbar 4, millions of Toolbar users are now adding custom buttons directly to their browsers. You can help users visit your site (and more) with just a click. By adding your website's custom button to the Google Toolbar, people can instantly: Visit your website Search your website by entering a query into the Google search box and clicking your custom button Get the latest feeds from your website by clicking the drop-down menu next to your custom button Sound daunting? It shouldn...

If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, does it make a sound? Even more perplexing: if you have a great, content-rich website and nobody visits it, is the content useful? Rather than debate this, I'd like to share with you five ways that Google webmaster tools can help you drive more users to your site and improve the visibility of the site content you've worked so hard to create. 1. Submit all of your pages to the Google index – for free. By using Google Sitemaps to submit your URLs , you help Google's web crawler do a more complete and efficient job of crawling your site. Sitemaps enables you to submit all of your pages to the Google index, and it's particularly useful for making sure that we know about all dynamically generated URLs or pages that are not adequately linked to on your site. But please note: submitting a Sitemap will not guarantee inclusion or influence your PageRank, and isn't a replacement for creating compelling and useful content....