Several weeks ago a several Adsense publisher has complains about recent modifications in the click behavior for Adsense ads. While an Internet visitor was able before to click the whole ad area to reach the target page, is the new ad only clickable on the ad title and the URL. This modification was done by Google to ban unwanted clicks for their advertisers. Afterwards I think that most of the publisher doesn’t have noticed a change in their earnings (maybe a publisher who need those unwanted clicks to earn money).

Enough about this, there are new features!

Managing Ads via the Adsense control panel

Since a few days it’s possible to use this great feature to maintain existing ad code without changing your HTML. Just create a first (new) ad zone and place some standard Adsense code into your HTML (yeah I’m talking about an account from a publisher in Europe). If you need to change the colors, ad dimensions or ad channel on a later moment, just do it within your Adsense control panel. This is really a time safer! This way it’s easy to change for example the color for multiple pages from your website with just a few mouse clicks. (more…)

These days Google announced that the product Referrals 2.0 will become available to the most of their publishers. Yesterday I got the chance to have a first look on this new product. The first thing I noticed is that its very easy to use, just like the other Adsense products.

The old Referral product screen is extended with a number of categories where the publisher can choose multiple categories for his ad publishing campaign. From every category it’s possible to preview the advertisers. At this point there was the first “scary” thing! SPAM!

I checked the telecommunication category and found several advertisers for diet pills! I checked some other popular categories and got the same result.
Nice is the feature to select ads for specific countries and languages, but also in other countries and languages the same situation: non related advertisers in multiple categories. (more…)

Today there was the release of the new interface for the Google Groups, a community styled system with WYSIWYG functionality and file storage.

Web products for groups have traditionally focused on an email thread or message board format; they’ve been largely text based. Google Groups, however, now provides a richer forum for group collaboration with the following new features…

A quote from the official press release. (more…)

In the quest for monetizing their website, webmasters sometimes forget the base fact that they own the site and not Google Adsense! So, often you see webmasters ask questions like ‘Whether Adsense TOS allows linking to such and such site or whether the TOS allows pictures next to ads and so on and so forth. As long as the queries are related to simple ad placement it may be OK but more and more webmasters are getting influenced by the TOS and ad returns that they are willing to modify the content itself. This cannot be good news for the internet since finally it is the quality of information that matters along with the way it is presented. If you are good at presenting your knowledge in a certain way (say, first person), then you should continue to do so, irrespective of whether Google Adsense representatives likes it or not. (more…)