We think it's important for all publishers, both new and veteran, to understand the role they play in our ad network ecosystem. While AdSense is designed for publishers to monetize their websites with Google ads, it's also designed to extend the reach for our AdWords advertisers, providing them with ad real estate whose value is close to that on Google Search results.

If your website performs well for advertisers, there may be increased competition among them to fill your ad spaces. This means we'd have a wider variety of possible ads to display, so the ads you see on your site may be more relevant to your site content and your users' interests. This may lead to more clicks from your users, more placement-targeted campaigns geared towards your site, and increased advertiser bids. Overall, you're likely to earn more revenue with your site if advertisers are generating conversions and receiving quality leads from your site.

On the other hand, if your website performs poorly for advertisers, they may be less inclined to display on your site. This means that the ads our system displays on your site may not be as relevant to your site content and your users' interests, leading to fewer clicks and decreased advertiser bids. As a result, you're likely to earn less revenue with your site if advertisers are performing poorly.

To maximize the value for advertisers displaying on your site, we recommend focusing on developing a high-quality site with original content that's valuable to your users. For more information, please consult our program policies and Webmaster Quality Guidelines for reference.

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

Whether it's your high school yearbook, the ticket stub from a movie you saw with your first sweetheart, or the lock of hair from your child's first trim, we all have mementos that we like to keep around. However, we hope that your AdSense check isn't one of them!

As a friendly reminder, AdSense checks expire after 6 months, so once you get your check in the mail please don't forget to deposit it.

If you're holding onto to a check and it expires, your account will be placed on hold and you'll need to re-select a form of payment to resume payments the next time you've crossed the US $100 threshold. For many of you, you may consider trying EFT, Western Union, or local currency checks if they're available in your country. If you don't yet see your preferred payment option for your country yet, please know we're working hard to add additional forms of payment in the future.

So no lolly-gagging! Once you've got your payments, it's off to the bank with you to count all your ad-dollars and ad-cents!

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Publisher Support

Today, we're happy to announce the release of the beta version of a new open-source browser: Google Chrome. We encourage you to download it and give it a try.

Google Chrome features a simple and intuitive user interface and an entirely new architecture designed for speed, security, and stability. You can find out more about other Google Chrome features here.

For publishers, you should see the ads on your pages continue to appear as normal in Google Chrome; we built Google Chrome so that most webmasters and site owners shouldn't have to make changes to their sites. If your site is compatible with Safari, it should also be compatible with Google Chrome, as they are both built using WebKit. If you have any questions regarding compatibility with your site, feel free to refer to our webmaster site.

To learn more about why we built Google Chrome, see our official Google blog.

Posted by Brian Rakowski - Google Chrome Product Manager

Whether you're a new to this blog or have been with us since way back in August of aught five, we'd like to provide a few simple tips for effectively using the features provided on our site.

First of all, we've made it easy to subscribe to the blog so that you'll never miss a post. There are a few ways to do so:

• E-mail
  Have a Google Account? Then visit our subscription page, or just enter your email address into the yellow box on the right sidebar of this page. You'll be subscribed via Google Groups, and we'll send you a confirmation email. Once you confirm your subscription, you'll begin to see new blog posts in your email inbox.
  
  
• RSS Reader
  After clicking on the 'Site Feed' link in the upper right-hand corner of this page, you'll be taken to a Feedburner URL, which you can access from any RSS Reader or Live Bookmark of your choice. To view all of your feed subscription options, look for the 'Subscribe Now!' box on the right side.
  
  
• iGoogle
  Click the white '+ Google' icon on the top right, and you can receive the latest Inside AdSense updates on your iGoogle page or within Google Reader.
  
  

There's also plenty of content in our blog archives. Here are some ways to access some of those useful posts from the past:

• Labels
  Each post is tagged at the bottom with one or more labels that reflect the content of that post. All of these labels are also listed on our sidebar, which you can use to sort through past posts - for instance, click the 'Optimization' label to view all the posts related to optimizing AdSense on your site. You'll notice that this post is tagged with 'Newbie', since that's been our focus on recent Fridays.
  
  
• "You may have missed..."
  This name says it all - check the right sidebar for this section, where we'll be rotating links to useful posts from past months.
  
  
• Search box
  You can search for the topic of your choice using the search box at the top right. Using the tabs on the results page, you can choose whether to search within the AdSense blog or other resources such as our Help Center, the AdSense Forum, and the web.
  
  

We hope these tips will help you become a pro at navigating and absorbing our blog posts in the future!

Posted by Takayuki Funakoshi - AdSense Publisher Support

Back in March, we announced the beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams. Today, we are pleased to announce general availability of the product -- no invitation required! Thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries already serve billions of impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've heard from them that Ad Manager has helped increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns.

Now we're excited to bring those benefits to all publishers. If you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today. If not, apply for an AdSense account now. A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.

Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

We've been busy since March; in addition to supporting thousands of new publishers on Ad Manager, we've been adding new features including:

• Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in Turkish or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can! Ad Manager supports international currencies, too.
  
• Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue.
  
• Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
  
• Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start the campaign.
  
• Day and Time Targeting: Don't want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. With day and time targeting, you can set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, or as little as 15 minutes per week. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, user language, operating system, domain and custom targeting.
  

We also continue to roll out new features for the DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions, including DART for Publishers (DFP), our ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center by providing new opportunities for publishers of all sizes.

If you have any additional questions about Ad Manager or want to learn more, visit the Ad Manager Help Center.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler - Product Manager, Google Ad Manager

We'd like to remind you that once you've been approved for AdSense, you can place the code from your account on any page that complies with our program policies. Simply generate new code and paste it onto your site -- we don't need to update your account, so there's no need to contact us about your new site (although we appreciate the thought!). Even if your sites relate to completely different topics, our system will display appropriate ads for each site. This is because your ad targeting is based on the content of your pages, rather than set within your account. In addition, please keep in mind that publishers may only maintain one account per payee name, so there's no need for you to submit a new application.

If you run multiple websites, you may wish to view separate reports for each domain. Simply create a URL channel for each one. You won't need to modify your code in any way, and your URL channels will begin tracking data almost immediately. If you need to send these reports to other people who manage your site with you, you can set up emailable reports.

But what if you've sold the website you applied to AdSense, and now you run another one? We don't need to update your account information in any way. Just remove your ad code from the old site, paste new code onto your current site, and our system will automatically take care of the rest.

Finally, we'd like to note that we do constantly review sites displaying Google ads to make sure that they're complying with the AdSense program policies. If we find that a site isn't compliant with our policies, we'll contact the publisher whose ad code appears on the site to address the situation. If you're concerned about others placing your ad code on non-policy compliant pages, we recommend using our Allowed Sites feature.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

This Saturday, August 23rd, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in during these hours, but we'll continue to track your earnings and serve ads to your pages. For those of you located in different time zones, we've provided the maintenance start time for a few international cities:

London - 6pm Saturday
Istanbul - 8pm Saturday
Bangalore - 10:30pm Saturday
Hanoi - 12am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday

Finally, you may have noticed that we're posting this message a little earlier than usual. Based on your feedback, we'll do our best to post these maintenance reminders earlier in the week to help you plan ahead. Thanks for the suggestion!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

When you visit the AdSense Setup tab in your account, you'll notice a new "AdSense for feeds" option. This means you can now use AdSense to place ads in your RSS feeds, allowing you to increase the reach of your content while earning revenue. Our salesforce will sell cost-per-impression (CPM) ads directly to the largest advertisers, while the rest of your inventory will be filled with contextually targeted cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM ads. This means that more of your feed items will be sold and with higher overall revenue, than with any other feed network.

At this point, you may either be thinking, "great!" or "umm...what's a feed?" For those of you in the second category, feeds allow your content to be delivered and subscribed to on the Web, often as headlines, summaries or articles. FeedBurner also has a nifty tutorial that you might find useful.

And here are a few more reasons to try AdSense for feeds:

• Receive higher CPMs and maintain a positive user experience by displaying ads specifically optimized for RSS feeds.
  
• View detailed stats on your feed audience, distribution, and more through FeedBurner when you set up your feeds with AdSense.
  
• Manage monetization for your feeds through the same account that you use to manage other AdSense properties.
  

AdSense for feeds is currently enabled in all languages supported by AdSense for content.

Want to learn more about what feeds are and how to get started with AdSense for feeds? Visit our Help Center and watch our introductory video from Product Manager Steve Olechowski:



To set up AdSense for feeds now, sign in and visit the AdSense Setup page of your account, or apply for an AdSense account.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing

Have you ever checked your reports and noticed that you have clicks reported, but no revenue? We'd like to explain why this may happen, as we frequently receive emails and questions on our Help Forum about this issue. What you're seeing may be due to one of the following:

1. Allowed Sites setup
   
   The Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where ads from your account may be displayed. If you're using this feature, you'll need to make sure that you've listed all sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   To check if this is the case, log into your account and visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSense Setup tab. If the radio button 'Allow any site to show ads for my account ' is populated, you're not being affected by this issue, and you should continue to #2 below. However, if 'Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account' is populated, review the list of sites in the box below -- are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is 'no', you won't be credited for clicks on the missing sites. Please be sure to add all of the sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
   
   We've noticed some confusion among publishers who have entered the sites of advertisers they'd like to see on their pages into the Allowed Sites list. Please know that this is not the case, as it's not possible to request ads for a particular page - the sites you enter into this box can only be sites where your ads can be placed.
   
   
2. Invalid clicks
   
   It's possible that you have some clicks that our monitoring system has considered to be invalid. As we've mentioned before, we monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads for any activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Any clicks that our system considers invalid will still appear on your 'Overview' page, under the Reports tab. However, because our advertisers aren't charged for these clicks and impressions, we won't show the earnings for this activity. If you're concerned about suspicious activity in your account, we recommend reviewing your site's logs and letting us know about the situation.
   
   Rest assured that AdSense accounts are properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid. We'll post your finalized earnings for a given month on your 'Payment History' page during the first week of the following month. For more information about invalid clicks, please review our Help Center.
   

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

We've heard your feedback about the availability of video units, so we've expanded the languages and geographies where they're supported. We've added French, German, and Spanish to our list of supported languages, and also Brazil, Germany, India, and Mexico to the list of supported countries. To help you determine whether you'll be able to use video units, consider these two questions:

1. Do you have an English, French, German, Japanese, or Spanish-language AdSense account?
   
   
2. Are you located in one of the following countries?
   
   Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
   

If you answered 'yes' to both questions, then video units are available to you. Sign in to your AdSense account and visit your AdSense Setup tab to get started. After linking your YouTube and AdSense accounts, you'll be able to customize and embed the video player into your website, and choose between having videos automatically targeted to your content or manually selecting content categories and content providers. Companion and text overlay ads will appear with your videos, and you'll generate earnings for valid clicks and impressions on those ads.

You can find more information about video units in our Help Center, and as always, please feel free to leave us a comment with your video unit feedback. We'll be sure to keep you posted if video units become available in any additional countries or languages.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Last October, we introduced Western Union Quick Cash as a new payment method for a number of countries. We're excited to let you know that we've now expanded this payment method to Bulgaria, Egypt, Lithuania, Morocco, and Taiwan. If you're located in one of these countries, you'll be able to pick up your AdSense payments in cash at your local Western Union agent. This payment method is free, and you'll no longer need to wait for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

Please keep in mind that in order to pick up your payment, you'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please fill out our online form. In addition, we'd like to note that payments by Western Union Quick Cash are only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

Signing up for payments by Western Union is a quick process - just follow these instructions. For more information about this payment method, including exchange rates and how to pick up your payments, we recommend visiting our Help Center.

Posted by Korey Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm PDT. While you won't be able to log in to your account during these hours, the maintenance won't affect your ad targeting or delivery and your earnings will still be tracked in your reports like always.

To celebrate the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games, here's the start time of the maintenance in past, present, and future host cities for the Summer Olympics:

Montreal - 1pm Saturday
London - 6pm Saturday
Athens - 8pm Saturday
Beijing - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 3am Sunday

We hope the maintenance period will give you an opportunity to catch a few matches and root for your home country!

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

We often receive questions from new publishers about what these two terms mean, and we'd like to help you understand the difference.

Invalid clicks are clicks for which we decide not to charge our AdWords advertisers, since they may artificially drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue. These include extraneous clicks without any value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click. They also include many other types of clicks that we've determined aren't motivated by genuine user interest.

"Invalid clicks" are often confused with "clicking on your own ads". However, we'd like to stress that invalid clicks are generally any clicks that artificially inflate advertiser cost or publisher revenue, regardless of their source.

Click fraud is a subset of invalid clicks that are generated with malicious or fraudulent intent -- in other words, clicks that are intended to drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue artificially. Sources for these clicks include, but are not limited to:

A publisher clicking on his own ads, or encouraging clicks on his ads

Users or family members clicking to support the site / publisher

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-click services and click-exchanges

Automated clicking tools, robots, or other deceptive software

The same principles above apply to ad impressions and conversions as well. Some sources of invalid impressions include, but are not limited to:

Excessive page refreshes, generated either manually or automatically

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-surf or auto-surf programs

Third-party programs for purchasing fixed amounts of traffic, e.g. "$10 for 1,000 page views"

As a reminder, any method that artificially generates clicks, impressions, or conversions is strictly prohibited by our program policies. You can also find more information about these topics in our Invalid Clicks FAQ and our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.

Updated links to resources

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

In the coming months, we'll be rolling out some new foundational features in AdWords for the content network. These features are intended to enhance your earning potential and the effectiveness of ads we serve to users on your sites. Some of the benefits of these features include:

• Frequency capping, which prevents users from repeatedly seeing the same ads on your pages.
  
• Improved attribution, to help advertisers identify the best performing sites in the network based on post-impression activity.
  
• Improved ads quality, as we're able to improve ad performance within the Google content network.
  

You can read about these in more detail on our official Google blog. To enable these features, we'll be implementing a DoubleClick ad serving cookie on the content network. We now have a program policy that covers data usage related to the launch of these new features.

We're excited about these upcoming features that will improve the experience for users and protect privacy while creating more value for our publishers and advertisers.

Posted by Wei Yang - AdSense Publisher Support

The maxim about the Internet is that content is king. While this holds true for AdSense publishers, there’s one important caveat: if it’s not text-based content, our crawler might not notice.

While we’re constantly working to improve our targeting technology, our crawlers need text to properly match ads to your pages. Although images, flash, and streaming video can help spice up a site, relying heavily on these sorts of elements will make it difficult for us to get a good read on what your site is about.

If your site uses a lot of these features, make sure you provide enough text-based content in one of our supported languages to effectively convey the topic of your site. If our crawler doesn’t find enough text, you may get poorly targeted ads or public service ads (PSAs). While we can't say the exact amount of text content that you'll need to receive targeted ads, we do recommend including complete sentences and paragraphs on your pages.

To improve your ad targeting, here are few other pointers:

• Use text in addition to images when possible. Please note that the crawler can't read text contained within images.
  
• If you use images, be sure to title them appropriately and provide descriptive ALT tags.
  
• Try imagining your site without pictures or dynamic content. This will give you a good idea of what our crawler reads. If you lack imagination, you can try turning the images off in your web browser.
  

Finally, it's important to keep in mind that the AdSense for content ads on your site are automatically determined. Though it's not possible to choose the ads that are placed on your site, including more text-based content will help make it possible for our system to target your site correctly.

Posted by Kent Sugarman - AdSense Publisher Support

A number of publishers have asked us if it's acceptable to place multiple publishers' ad code on the same page or site. Often they'll run into this issue when two AdSense publishers manage a site together and both want to display their ads, or if a site owner hosts content and ads from other publishers on the same page as their own.

The answer is that yes, we do allow this. But before you place your ad code on the same page or site as another publisher, here are a few important points to keep in mind:

• The maximum number of products per page will remain the same.
  
• If you don't own the site, you'll need to receive permission from the site owner to display your ads on their pages.
  
• We're unable to divide earnings between accounts, so any revenue generated will be credited to the account associated with the ad unit that was clicked or viewed.
  
• Any shared site that displays Google ads must also comply with our program policies.
  
• You're responsible for the content of any page where your ad code appears. Before placing your ad code on another publisher's site, we recommend reviewing the site for any policy violations.
  

And one final tip before giving your code to another publisher -- try using our Allowed Sites feature to monitor where your ads are appearing and keep your account in good standing.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

With all of the different AdSense products we now offer, it can be tough to keep track of the maximum number of each type of unit that our program policies allow. To help you remember these important numbers, here's a list.

On any policy-compliant page, you can display:

ONE...
- video unit (currently only available in specific countries and languages, though we're working to expand video units to additional publishers soon)

TWO...
- AdSense for search boxes

THREE...
- standard AdSense for content ad units, and
- 3 link units

While you can place all of these on one page, please also keep the user experience in mind. We strongly recommend maintaining a balance between the number of ads and the unique, quality content on your site, which will keep your readers engaged and coming back for more. Also, the more text-based content you have on your site, the more relevant your ads will be.

If you'd like help with generating ad code for additional ad units, feel free to review our Generating Ad Code video or our Quick Start Guide.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

If you're an avid Inside AdSense reader, you know that we frequently post about the latest developments in AdSense and new features you can take advantage of. However, we've heard from some publishers that they want to know more about what's happening in AdWords, and what we're doing to bring more relevant, targeted ads to AdSense sites like yours. With that, we'd like to take a moment to give you insight into a few recent AdWords developments, and what they mean for you as an AdSense publisher.

One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser's keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you'll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.

What does this mean for you, as an AdSense publisher? Your users may see more relevant ads on your pages, and advertisers who become more confident that their ads are reaching the right audience may increase their ad spend -- both of these can result in higher monetization for you. In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.

With these recent improvements, we're looking forward to expanding the number of advertisers who use the AdSense content network and increasing the relevance of their ads on your sites. Not only will this increase your earnings potential through the AdSense program, but it will also strengthen the ads ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers, and users.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

(To the tune of "Strangers in the Night")

"Publishers with websites, creating content
Wondering about their sites
If with their content, they could show some ads
Before the day was done

Something in AdSense, was so inviting
Something about those ads, was so exciting
Something in our Help Center
Told them they must be one

Publishers with websites, yearning for earnings
They were just publishers with websites
Up to the moment
When they placed their first ad code
Little did they know
Revenue was just a click away
A happy-user-generated click away and --

Ever since that day, they've been monetizing
Newbies at the start, they're now optimizing
It turned out so right
For publishers with websites.

Newbie, newbie dooo, da da da daaaa da..."

If my lyrical effort didn't clue you in, and our Newbie Central resource wasn't a big enough clue, let me come right out and say it: we care about new publishers. For the next few weeks, we'll be sharing that caring every Friday, with posts especially intended for all the publishers who have recently joined AdSense, fresh and green like a newly mown lawn in the summertime. Look for this logo to identify posts in this series:


Now let's see if we can apply that same spirit of new beginnings to your sites.

Updated with logo

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Since our announcement about retiring AdSense Referrals during the last week of August, we've noticed a number of questions in your blog comments and in our Help Forum. In this post, we'll address some of the most frequently asked questions.

When you say 'AdSense Referrals' are being retired, does this only mean the program where I refer publishers to AdSense?

No, all referrals will be retired. This applies to referrals for AdWords advertisers, as well as for Google products.

What's the deadline for generating referral conversions once the program has been retired?

In order for you to be credited for a conversion, the referred user must complete the required action by the last week of September 2008. However, please keep in mind that your referral units will no longer display after the last week of August.

I have referral earnings in my account, but they haven't been included in a payment yet. Will I lose all past referral earnings?

No. If you've had successful referral conversions in the past, they'll still be included in your earnings and future payments. As mentioned above, any additional conversions must occur by the last week of September 2008 in order to generate earnings for your account.

Can I sign in to the Google Affiliate Network with my AdSense login information?

At this time, no. You'll need to create a new login and password on the Google Affiliate Network site at http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/ .

Will my ad units and search boxes be affected by this Referrals change?

No, AdSense for content and AdSense for search will still be available to publishers in our supported languages, and you can continue to generate ad and search code by visiting your AdSense Setup tab.

Thanks for your feedback, and we hope this helps provide clarification. Feel free to visit our Help Center for additional details about the AdSense Referrals retirement.

Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

In addition to participating in the AdSense network, you may also be interested in having your site ranked in organic Google search. In this post, I'll highlight some important points for search optimization. While there's no a magic formula to make your site show up first on a search results page, there are some good practices when it comes to links, design, content, and the structure of your site.

First of all, as a reminder, Google organic search and AdSense are independent of each other. Displaying AdSense ads on a site won't change the ranking of the site in Google search in any way. So it follows that sites containing AdSense ads don't receive special treatment in Google search.

Ranking in Google search is based on many different algorithms, and optimization for search is a long, continuous process. For these reasons, and because the techniques might violate our guidelines, we recommend avoiding any techniques that claim to optimize your ranking very quickly or radically. If you have concerns or questions, you can consult other webmasters on a number of forums, including Google's official forum for webmaster-related issues.

We encourage you to monitor the quality of your site's backlinks -- links from any site directing to your site. To increase your site's popularity, check if other sites that discuss similar topics or have a similar reader base are aware your site exists.

Outgoing links are also important and should comply with our guidelines. When you create a link to another site, we recommend first asking yourself: "Is this link going to be useful for my visitors?" or "Is this link likely to be clicked by my visitors?". Don't participate in link schemes or buy/sell links that pass PageRank, as it is against our guidelines and may hurt your site's performance in our search results.

Here are some tips for structuring your site:

• Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
  
• Use <title> tags that are explicit and useful for the user. For example, avoid a title like "Homepage" or "Welcome to my site".
  
• For images, use ALT attributes to describe appropriately what the image is about. We've recently created a quick and useful YouTube video to further explain this topic:
  
  
  

Also, adding original and compelling content on a regular basis may help Google crawl your pages regularly. It can have the added benefit of attracting links to your pages too.

Finally, design your site with your users in mind, and be patient and consistent in your efforts. To attract quality backlinks and develop your optimization strategy, it's important to keep a clear structure for your pages and regularly add organic content.

Posted by Ambroise Fensterbank - Search Quality Evaluator

Following on the five tips on AdSense for content optimization our Sydney team presented a couple weeks back, now let's turn to AdSense for search. As you may know, we recently integrated Custom Search Engine into AdSense for search to provide additional customization options and improved targeting. Whether you've already implemented an AdSense for search box on your site or you're just getting started with this feature, we recommend these five optimization tips:

1. Place your search boxes in visible locations.
   
   Integrate your search boxes in easy-to-find locations, such as under the header or in your left navigation. Also, keep the placement of your search boxes consistent on all your pages, so users will know where to look if they need help finding something.
   
   
2. Add two search boxes to content-rich pages.
   
   For pages with a lot of content or which require scrolling, try placing one search box at the top of the page and another at the bottom. A box at the top of the page will allow users to perform a search immediately, and a box at the bottom will provide a search option to users who've just finished reading your content. You can also track and compare the performance of each search box by creating custom channels.
   
   
3. Host your search results on your own site.
   
   To keep users on your pages, you can host your search results and ads within your own pages. If your users don't find what they're looking for in the search results or ads, they'll still be able to to navigate to other sections of your site using your site's template. In addition, you can further integrate your search results into your site by customizing the colors of the results page.
   
   
4. Add a search box to your search results pages.
   
   Similar to #3, try placing a search box on your search results pages so users can perform additional searches from your site.
   
   
5. Customize your ad locations.
   
   Place ads at the top and right sidebar of your search results pages. This layout offers added visibility, and our tests have shown that these ad locations can improve monetization.
   

After you've optimized where search boxes are placed on your site, don't forget to try new targeting options such as keyword refinements and vertical search. To generate AdSense for search code and take advantage of these features, sign in and visit your AdSense Setup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center.

Posted by Sandra Tsui - AdSense Publisher Support

We'd like to let you know about two recent improvements to video units that make them more easy and appealing to place on your sites. First, we've partnered with some new content providers that we'd like to highlight. These partners have signed on to let AdSense publishers embed their videos and share in the ad revenue.

• Broadbandtv: "Broadbandtv is partnering with YouTube to bring the very best video program lineup to a growing and engaged online audience. Broadbandtv shows include hits from Fashion, Celebrity News, Sports, Technology, Comedy and Travel to top notch Spanish-language TV series like Somos Tu y Yo."
  
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: "CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada's national public broadcaster and one of its largest cultural institutions. CBC/Radio-Canada is available how, where, and when Canadians want it."
  
• The Orchard: "A global leader in digital music, video, new media and brand services, The Orchard offers family content like Gumby, Mr. Bill, My Favorite Martian, and other categories of content like music and comedy."
  

To give you a better idea of the videos that are available for syndication to your site, we've also created a gallery of some featured video units content partners. Note that to choose any of these content providers for your video unit, you should get their YouTube username by visiting their YouTube channel, and then put this username into the "Channel" field when choosing content for your unit.

Second, we're happy to announce that video units now support 728x90 and 160x600 formats to more easily fit into your site. These two new formats will feature five video thumbnails - when a user clicks on one of the thumbnails, a full sized video unit will appear, along with accompanying ads:

728x90 video unit


728x90 video unit, expanded


160x600 video unit, expanded



You'll generate earnings for valid clicks or impressions on the ads which appear. To use the new formats, you'll need to create new video units by visiting your AdSense Setup tab. To choose the new content for your video units, you can edit any of your players or set up new video units dedicated to this new content. Please keep in mind that video units are currently only supported for English or Japanese-language accounts in the following regions:

Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States

Finally, if you haven't edited or made a new video unit recently, you may not have noticed that you can now preview the kinds of video that will show up in the unit, based on the filtering choices you've made. We heard that you wanted more insight into the types of content that would display, and we think this will help.

While you can use video units like any other ad, they're also a great addition to the content of your page. So we encourage you to use video units as you may have used embedded YouTube videos in the past - to add variety and interest for your users.

Thanks for all the feedback that's helping us to make video units more useful to you. If you have more thoughts to share, please leave us a comment.

Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing

We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

• Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.
  
  
• AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.
  

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

• Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
  
• Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.
  

Thank you for your support of AdSense Referrals in the past. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Anuj Srivastava - AdSense Product Marketing

This week, the 50,000th person subscribed to the English AdSense Help Group. To mark this milestone, the AdSensePro Team would like to extend a special word of thanks to all the folks who use our forums, particularly everyone who takes the time to share their knowledge with other publishers. Thank you for providing useful help and advice, and for contributing to the AdSense community.

If you're not familiar with the Help Group, do check it out to share your AdSense experience. Members of the AdSensePro team will also be on hand to help answer questions, raise issues to our product and engineering teams, and collect your valuable feedback. And if you'd prefer to discuss AdSense in a language other than English, feel free to visit one of our international forums: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Turkish.

Posted by the AdSensePro Team - AdSense Help Group Support