After several years in beta test, Google has just launched the much anticipated ‘AdSense for Feeds’. When you next visit the Setup tab in your AdSense account, you’ll notice a new ‘AdSense for Feeds’ option.

Features

• Optimized CPC and CPM ads
• Ads specifically design for RSS feeds
• Wide range of customization options
• Detailed stats on your feed audience and distribution
• Manage monetization of your feeds through your AdSense account

To activate a AdSense for Feeds, you can either burn a feed directly in your AdSense account or migrate a feed(s) from your Feedburner account. I recommend burning your feed in Feedburner first as you have more choices of options and stats.

Migrating FeedBurner Feeds to Google AdSense

In order to activate AdSense for Feeds, you need to migrate your FeedBurner account into your Google Account. To migrate all of your feeds, and your account from feeds.feedburner.com to Google, email adsense-support-aff@google.com and provide the following information:

* Your FeedBurner account username
* The Google Account email address you use to sign in to AdSense

Google will migrate your account and contact you with specific steps for you to follow once migration is complete.

Google [[GOOG]] never stops innovating their AdSense product line. So far this year, we have seen first the testing then roll out of Google logos and Google Checkout icons in AdSense text ads.

The incorporation of links in AdSense text ads was first spotted more than a year ago. Lately, the ads have been seen with greater frequency. The ad show below was captured yesterday on a photography blog.

I have marked the new links with a black arrow. In previous examples seen in larger 200x200px ads, the new links are preceded by the words, “Change to ads about:”. In the leaderboard size (728×90px) text ads, the links have appeared in the border preceded by word, “Related”.

I presume that clicking on one of the links will take you to a SERP of sponsored ads.

It is interesting that the AdSense ad shown above contains all the recent innovations: Google logo, Google Checkout icon, and the new links.

What about the non-standard matching border? That’s not a AdSense option. It was accomplished by wrapping the ad code in a div tag.

Marissa Mayer, Google VP for Search Products stated, “with universal search, we’re attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results.

There are also new navigation elements and experimental features to help users better navigate the SERPs. These include contextual navigation links above the search results that allow “drill down” to specific types of information and a new universal navigation bar at the top of all Google web pages to provide easier navigation to your favorite Google products, such as Gmail. Yipee!

You can try the sample searches given by Google in the press release:

steve jobs
darth vader
nosferatu

Last November, I wrote that the Google Sitemap Protocol (open-source protocol based on XML) had become the de facto Standard in the search engine industry. Webmasters no longer had to submit sitemaps in different formats to different search engines. However, only Google and Yahoo! had sitemap submission sites.

In a recent post on Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, What’s new with Sitemaps.org?, Vanessa Fox announced that Google will ‘discover’ your sitemap from your robots.txt file. All you have to do is add a single line to your robot.txt file in the following format¹:

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

This makes perfect sense because all search crawlers recognize the robots.txt file. OK, so most webmasters have already submitted their sitemaps via Google’s Webmaster’s Tools and Yahoo!’s Site Explorer. So what’s the big deal? The key change is that other search engines including Yahoo!, MSN Live Search, and Ask.com are supporting both the sitemap protocol and robots.txt inclusion.

This is especially good news for WordPress users because a sitemap can be automatically generated in the XML format using the Google Sitemap plugin.

Also, I highly recommend using the Smart Update Pinger plugin to insure that services are pinged only when you first publish a post and not each time you edit it.

Getting your WordPress blog properly indexed just got a lot easier!

See also:
Discovering Sitemaps
Webmasters Can Now Auto-Discover With Sitemaps

Using Google AdSense on your blog? Probably! AdSense seems to be everywhere these days. Everyone is blending their text ads using the same color palette producing similar and sometimes exactly the same ads resulting in a new form of ad blindness.

A new site (established Dec. 2006) called adClustr is offering free innovative ad embellishments. According to the webmaster, “adClustr is a place where you can find new and innovative ways to blend those text-based ads provided by such services as Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher or Text-Link-Ads. Successful ad integration is the top priority here at adClustr. We will show you how to combat ad blindness and increase your CTR, all in legal fashion without the use of any nasty banned practices”.

AdClustr combines a bit of Photoshop work with some clean CSS code and voilà – your ad has a totally new look! Currently, there are embellishments for most of the standard ad formats. These ads embellishments are not tacky – no postcards or clipboards.

You will need to download a lightweight image, upload to it your server, update your CSS, and generate new AdSense code using the recommended colors. Below is an example¹ of an adClustr.com 234x60px ad embellishment called: ‘Simple Slanted Black Half-Banner‘.

My favorites are the 125x125px button ads. Without a bit of bling, these small ads are boring and disappear into blog content. Dressed up with a new background, they really stand out nicely. Mosey on over to adClustr.com and take look around. I am sure you find some ad bling to your liking (new ad bling is added regularly). You will also find other timely information on ad networks, blending, and compliance issues.

Just a reminder that adding AdSense code inside a WordPress post or page requires a plugin such as AdSense-Deluxe.

Tags: AdSense

I saw this AdSense ad on my sidebar earlier today. It appeared in my prime 200x200px ad spot. The add code for that spot allows either image or text ads. To my surprise, Google served up what appears to be combination text/image ad. The image is reduced in size leaving room at the top for a lengthy hyperlink. Most image ads have had text in them before – but nothing that looked so blatantly like a hyperlink.

The link in the ad does not follow the colors that I selected for the text-only ads. Also, there is a small arrow (middle right) inviting a ‘positive response’ from a viewer. What do you think? Is the ad more interesting that either a pure AdSense text ad or a pure Adsense image ad? Is the little arrow perhaps a bit too inviting?

Update (May 15): Looking back, I now think Google was testing CPA ads on my site. I have seen others since then.

Tags: Google, AdSense

Google, however, allows you to specify content to display whenever they don’t have sufficient relevant ads in their inventory. Instead of their ads, they display your alternate ad(s).

Use a HTML WYSIWYG editor such as Microft FrontPage to set-up and test your alternate ad. Here’s the basic code:

<html>
<head>
<title>Put Ad Title Here</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="margin:0; padding:0;">
<!--replace this line with your ad code-->
</div>
</body>
</html>

The ad on the web page can contain any content a normal web page can contain (text, image, Javascript, forms, and so forth) so long as it fits within the allotted ad space. I highly recommend using an alternate ad of the same dimensions as the AdSense ad. Save the ad as an html file. Then, upload it to your server. Check that all is well by pointing your browser to the ad. For example:

http://www.mywebsite.com/alternate-ad1.html

The alternate ad web page URL can be specified when you generate the ad code from your AdSense admin panel. The URL will then appear in the code generated between the quote characters of this line: google_alternate_ad_url = “”;

Remember to make an alternate ad web page for each ad format on your web site. Especially for image only ads that have limited inventory.

This technique can also be applied to other PPC ad providers such as Clicksor.

Tip: Never use AdSense as an alternate ad.

Tags: AdSense

Google [[GOOG]] is testing a number of enhancements to Adsense Text Ads. These include adding Google logos, favicons, and Google Checkout icons. Also, ads without “Ads by Google” have been reported. A recent addition to the list is the use of italized titles. Shown below is an example that appeared on another site recently. I have put the the italized ad together with the non-italized version for comparison purpose. The two ads actually appeared on separate pages loads.

In order to blend ads into websites, publishers can choose ad type (text or image), size (format), background colors, or font colors. Google does not, however, give publishers control over the font-family, font-style, or font-weight used in AdSense text ads.

Few websites use italized text in links or titles. Google must see this embellishment as a distinguishing feature that could attract attention and therefore, clicks. Every AdSense publisher knows that small changes in ads can make a huge difference in click-though-rates (CTR). Google is wise to test any changes extensively – no matter how subtle.

What do you think?

Tags: AdSense

Commenters do us a favor by participating in our blogs, the least we could do is give them a followable/indexable backlink. However, all versions of WordPress adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links inside the comments box. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc…) all obey this rel attribute (nofollow) which when used on a text or image link tells them not to index the link or pass link benefit to PageRank (Google). Both the comment author url and links inside the comment box are blocked.

WordPress developers have taken this step due to the deluge of blog comment Spam currently plaguing the blogosphere. In fact, they have been encouraged by Google to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute: “anywhere that users can add links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way to keep spammers at bay”. This recommendation makes sense as many bloggers do not actively control Spam or manage comments.

However, Spam can be well-controlled if you use one of the three Spam control plugins for WordPress; Spam Karma 2, Akismet, or Bad Behavior. And, if you actively moderate comments for meaningful content.

Disabling the the rel=”nofollow” attribute can be done in 3 different ways:

1) Modify the comment-functions.php file in the /wp-includes/ folder.

2) Use the Show Top Commentators plugin.

3) Or, use the No Nofollow plugin.

I will not discuss modifying the comment-functions.php file as it’s beyond the capabilities or interests of most bloggers. The two plugins are easily installed and easily activated from the plugin admin page. Both plugins, written for WordPress v1.5, work in WordPress v2.0.

The ‘Show Top Commentators’ plugin has customizable features the require modifying sidebar template and modifying the plugin file itself. The ‘No Nofollow’ plugin very simply removes the pesky tags from the comment links. I prefer this plugin as it takes only a few minutes to install and activate.

Keep in mind that you are sharing some of your PageRank (albeit a small amount) with commenters when your remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

More cool ‘No nofollow’ logos can be found on Randa Clay’s site.

Update June 2006: This plugin has been disabled. Comment links are marked ‘nofollow’. Sorry about that.

Tags: WordPress, Spam

Google [[GOOG]] deals a serious blow to Yahoo, online brokers, and financial data providers by announcing free real-time last-sale prices across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Mobile, and Google.com. The Google service will be similar to Yahoo who offers free ECN quotes but charges $9.95 per month for streaming real-time quotes through its MarketTracker service.

It’s not a done deal yet as Google is waiting for approval from the SEC. Also, ZDNet points out that Google is not mentioned anywhere in the documents they referred to in their article. Therefore, the changes to be made could be global in nature rather than simply creating an exemption for one specific company. This fact was verified by a Reuters article that revealed the plan will allow websites to publish real-time prices in return for payments of $100,000 a month (original source – WSJ). Clearly, this deal is only for companies with deep pockets.

One caveat is that Reuters and Google mentions ‘NYSE’ real-time quotes. Does this include AMEX and NASDAQ quotes? If not, it will be nearly useless to the average investor. Google is a member of a group called NetCoalition, which has complained about a lack of real-time stock data offered through services owned by the NYSE Group and Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.

I will keep my current paid service active until all this shakes out.

Tags: Yahoo, Finance