The AdSense Test

Are You Ready for AdSense?

Contrary to many articles you may find scattered across the internet, Adsense is NOT for everyone. At least, not until you understand a few things and are prepared to follow the program and it's rules.

Are you ready for AdSense? Take the test and find out.

 
1. Do you know what a URL is?
2. Do you know what html is?
3. Do you know how to access html code?
4. Do you know how to copy and paste?
5. Do you have your own website or blog?
6. Is your website complete and launched?
7. Do you already have a stream of visitors to your website or blog?
8. Is your blog full of rich original content?
9. Did you write all your own articles?
10. Did you copy articles from other people?
11. Do you have free movies, music, or software links?
12. Is your site full of other people's videos?
13. Did you read the AdSense Program Policies and understand them?
14. Did you read the Webmaster Guidelines and understand them?
15. Did you read the Terms of Service and understand them?
16. Did you pay anyone for an AdSense "program"?

I'm sure some of you are probably thinking this is a joke, but it really isn't.
These are the sort of things we find ourselves answering in the AdSense Help Forums every day. Many people ask what a URL is and where they find it, or how to get one. Many more never bother to read the rules. Hundreds are taken in by websites selling a "product" related to Adsense. The fact is, you don't need to pay anyone at all to use AdSense.
Stay tuned for the Answers and explanations in The AdSense Test - Part 2


note: originally published on Qondio

Phishing for AdSense - or How Not to Get Hacked

In recent weeks I have noticed an increase in spam email coming into my mail accounts. In particular, these emails are purported to be from:

AdSense
AdWords
Blogger
Google

To date, none of them have actually been from any of those places, except the most recent one. They have been from spammers and scammers who hope someone will click a link in the email. Once clicked, the link will take a person to a page that is most likely set up to resemble a real page from any of those places, however, any sign in information you enter will be captured and used by the scammer.

How Will a Spammer/Scammer/Phisher Use My Information

If you use AdSense, they'll have the information to login to your AdSense account and redirect your earnings to themselves, or the information close out your account, or to do anything you can do in your AdSense account.

If you use Blogger, they'll have access to all your blogs. This means they can edit or change them, including putting their own adsense codes on your blog and removing yours. Most likely they are hoping your blogger login information is the same as your AdSense login. And it probably is.

With the Google account they can login to any service you use under Google.

What To Do When You Get An Email From any Google Source

The first thing you should do - don't panic. These guys often send emails saying your AdSense account has been disabled, and telling you to click the link to have it restored. The same sort of email is also used for Blogger accounts. Whatever you do, don't click any links in an email, even if you think it's from AdSense. Find out first who it's really from.

AdSense may indeed send you an email that your account is disabled, if it really is. And they do contain links, but usually the link leads only to a page on the AdSense Help Center.

The next thing you should do is check the header information. If you use gmail for your login you can show the header information by opening the email.

If you use the newer version of gmail, there is a link near the top and off to the right a little that says "show details".

When you click that, gmail will display the information in the email headers.


Check the information in the "From" and "Reply To" fields, as well as the "mailed by" and "signed-by" fields.

If you are still not certain, go the help forum and ask for help deciphering whether or not it's "really" from AdSense or Google or Blogger. Be sure to use the appropriate forum - if the email says it's from Blogger, use the Blogger help forum, if it says it's from AdSense, use the AdSense help forum.

When you are unsure - under no circumstances should you click any link in the email.

You can check the link by using the google safe browsing diagnostic page for the link. You do that by typing this string in the search bar and appending it with the page named in the link below - the link below is using the url for the blog you are reading now:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://helpfulinformationfornewbies.blogspot.com/

Change the part in red to the page url in the email link.

The linked page in the email used in the example above can be seen below:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http//:www.google.com/adplanner

This tool will tell you whether or not the site is hosting any malware or has been seen in the past to hold any malware.

Other things you can do are to copy the link from your email and enter it into your browser search bar. This will take you to the page that the link goes to, where you can see the information on the page.

Look at the page carefully and note it's location displayed in the browser. In the case of the email I used as an example, the browser displays the following URL ("x" replaces the real information to protect the innocent):

You can see that this URL goes to a secure google accounts login page for the Google Ad Planner.

If you are still uncomfortable about clicking anything on this page, then leave the page and navigate on your own to your Google Accounts page the way you normally would. Click on the service link from your own Google Accounts page (for wherever the email is from - Blogger or AdSense) and login from there.

Take Charge of Your Own Security

Never click links in an email without first ensuring it's security.
Use safe browsing ad-ons or plug-ins to avoid phishing or malware sites.
Use pop-up blockers to prevent scam ads from showing.
Read and investigate things before you sign up or click any links.


Places You can Find Help with Security Issues

"What The Tech Forums" - trustworthy and helpful with useful free software listings

"Safer Networking Forums" - also trustworthy will some excellent free software on site

"Google Search Help" - helpful information in their Help Center for safe surfing & browsing.

AdSense and India

Today's post is directed at prospective publishers from India. I have debated with myself for some time now whether or not to address this issue in my blog, mainly because picking out any one group of people might give the wrong impression. Hopefully, I don't offend anyone with this.

I chose to write this post because we have been seeing some questions in the AdSense Help forums lately that should be addressed.

Please keep in mind, I don't work for AdSense (or Google) and I do not represent them, so these answers are not to be considered "official", but are based on what we've seen, or read in the official AdSense Help Center or the Inside AdSense blog.

The first question of concern is this one:

"Is It True That AdSense is No Longer Accepting Applications from India?"

As far as we can tell, this is not true. AdSense is still accepting applications from publishers in India.

Like any propsective publisher who fills out an application, publishers from India must meet all the qualifications in order for their application to be accepted.

Whoever is telling people that Indian publishers are not being accepted anymore at AdSense because they are from India, is wrong.

The next "most asked" question is this:

"Is it true we can't use a blogspot address and must get a domain name if we are from India?"

The answer again, is no - this is not true.

Any publisher may apply for an AdSense account using a blogspot address. There is no requirement to purchase a domain or webhosting to get started, so don't let anyone talk you into buying a domain name before you are ready, or before you can afford it.

Blogspot addresses are perfectly acceptable to AdSense, providing the blog you use to apply for AdSense with meets all the policy requirements.

The last big question is:

"Why does a publisher from India have to wait 6 months?"

This one is harder to answer. It's one that we can only guess at, based on some of what we've experienced in helping Indian publishers.

The official statement in the AdSense help center says "In some locations, including China and India, we require publishers to have owned their sites for 6 months. We've taken this step to ensure the quality of our advertising network and protect the interests of our advertisers and existing publishers." (notation: quoted directly from the AdSense pages linked above.)

This means that the six month stipulation is not just in India and China, but it does include India and China. To my knowledge, there is no "official" list for the countries, so "in some countries" could mean any country AdSense chooses to include. For the most part, we are noticing this seems to be applied to many Asian countries, not just India.

My own observations seem to show that there are enormous numbers of people from India trying to get AdSense accounts, and trying to do so before they understand what is required of them in order to get approval.

I'm not sure why this is, though in some cases it might be differences in language and how well a person understands what they have read when they signed up for AdSense. (This is not, of course, limited to Indian publishers but to a lot of publishers for whom English is not the native tongue.)

Another thing I have noted with publishers from countries outside of the USA (keep in mind that I am not in the USA either) is that many of them do not understand or even are aware of the differences in legal requirements between their own countries and the USA.

In the USA, copyright infringements can cause all sorts of problems, and many non-US publishers don't seem to understand why they can't use copyrighted items, or why they can't give away things like illegal software.

There are many websites I have reviewed for publishers (many from India as well as other areas) that contain illegal software, movies, music and wallpapers, and this will be one of the reasons for not getting your application approved.

And it's one of the reasons you can have your account disabled too - no matter where you live.

If you read the Terms of Service for AdSense, down near the very end it says that AdSense is bound by the Laws of California and the USA and since they must operate under those laws, any publisher must also conform to those laws. This is an important bit of information that a lot of publishers miss seeing.

Webmaster Guidelines

One other thing that many new or applying publishers miss is the Webmaster Guidelines. These go hand-in-hand with the AdSense Program Policies, and all publishers are required to adhere to both of these.

Webmaster Guidelines indicate that a publisher must have "substantial original content". I suppose "substantial" will mean different things since it's a little subjective, but it really means you must have "enough" content to be accepted for AdSense. So what is "enough"? Since they don't actually give us any stiplulations about what "enough" is for AdSense, we have to guess at it. My own opinion is that you should have at least 10 lengthy posts (175 to 200 words or more per post) in your blog before you apply for AdSense. 20 would be better. And they should really be written works of your own, not articles you've copied from someone else, or from somewhere else.


Other Important Considerations

Other things of importance you need to consider when applying for AdSense.

You MUST use your own identity - your own name and address and country, and personal details. Otherwise, when it comes time to get paid, you won't be able to.

Publishers in many countries may not change their payee name, nor their country. AdSense simply does not allow this.

This means you would be required to cancel your approved AdSense account, and then apply for a new one all over again, using the correct information, so make sure your application for AdSense has the correct name and the correct country. This is very important if you want to get your payments, so don't try to get quicker approval by using a different country. You can't change it later.

If you have any questions about your application before you submit it to AdSense, post a question in the AdSense help forum - don't be afraid to ask for help. If it's a question we can answer in the forum, we will do our best to help you.

If you want to ask a question here, please feel free to leave a comment, and we'll address your question as well as we can. We aren't perfect, and we aren't AdSense, but we are certainly willing to help you have a successful AdSense application.

One final note: there seems to be quite a lot of rejection emails (for everyone, from just about anywhere) for "Domain Ownership not Evident" when people apply with a Blogger blog.

That's because blogspot URLs are considered "subdomains". In order to have adsense approve that blogspot URL, you MUST submit an application to Adsense using the "Monetize" link on your blog's dashboard.

That lets adsense crawlers know that your blog is a blogspot blog, and not just a regular subdomain.

Editing the HTML in the Blogger Template

NOTE: For information on editing and creating your blog using the Blogger in Draft, and the new Template Designer, please see this OTHER (newer) post!

Here we are, on the last step of the basic editing process for your blogger. This option can be found in your Layout section under "Edit HTML", and it looks like this when you get to the page:

The first thing you want to do is backup your template, so click the "Download Full Template" link and save it. If you are using a basic blogger template and haven't made any customized changes to the HTML then you probably don't need to do this, but it's a good habit to get into.

You will also want to backup your blog itself, so go to the Settings Tab and Select Basic. Right at the top is an option to export or import a blog. Select the Export option and save the blog on your hard drive. If anything goes wrong when you edit the html of your template you now have the data in your blog (the blog backup) and the original data from your template (the template backup) so you can restore your blog.

Editing the HTML is really not such a good idea if you don't have any experience at all with coding or html - blog templates contain CSS codes too, and if you aren't familiar with this, making a change in one place of the CSS can horribly affect something else, or can have no affect at all, because something needs changed elsewhere within the template.

Since the instructions I am giving are for total newbies (ie: people with no blogging or website editing experience) covering this sort of html change would take much more than a few simple instructions.

What I will show you is how to add things like the verification code for webmaster tools, or google analytics, or third party statcounters.

It's usually fairly simple since they actually give you the code and instruct you where to place it. The verification code goes in the head section of the template (see the blue text below), and you can also edit your blog description in the meta content (see the orange text), as well as adding additional keywords (see the red text). These are very simple edits, and as long as you keep your additions between the brackets and the quote marks, you should be fine. Note that you can add codes to the html/javascript widgets also and some codes require that they be added at the end of the body section, so be sure to read the instructions for whatever code you are planning to use.

Be careful when adding extra keywords. Keywords should only relate to your blog's content and subject matter. Trying to put keywords here that you think are "highly paying" but have nothing to do with your blog will actually lose you results in the search engine. Keep your keywords to a reasonable number - between 7 and 15 is usually good. Too many and your site could be considered spam, or could be penalized in searches because of keyword stuffing. Sometimes more is not better. The same can be said of the description field - don't make this too long, and make sure it describes your blog and it's contents.


The last thing you'll notice in the code above is one I added for a favicon - that's the little picture that displays beside the url of your blog in your browser's search bar - for standard blogger blogs, it's usually Blogger's white "B" in the orange square, but you can have your own if you want.

The first thing you need to is create the icon file. If you don't do image or graphic stuff at all, you could just do a web search for free icons, and find one you like that matches your blog, but they aren't hard to create. Many free image software programs can create an icon file from a picture. You will need to crop and resize your image file to 32 X 32 pixels, so make sure whatever you choose can actually be seen and recognized at that size. Then you need to save the file with a .ico extension, so make sure your editing software can do that.

You need to upload that file somewhere that you can link to it - photobucket, imagecave, your own web server, or even a picasa album.

Insert the code for the icon file into the html of your template (see the green code). Where the example shows this url reference:

http : //photographyofgrace.com/ favicon2.ico

You need to remove that (unless of course you plan to use my favico) and replace it with the url to your own favicon file. The balance of the code remains the same.

If you look around the internet, you'll find other easy tweaks you add into the head section of your template's html - things that can help with SEO for instance.

If you really want to edit the design portion of your template, the wisest thing to do is download the template and play around with it in an editor (try NVu or AlleyCode - they're both free). Once you have something you like, you can upload it (after backing up everything) using the "Upload a template from a file on your hard drive" option on the Edit Html page.

That's also how you upload any free template you might find on the web.

That pretty much concludes the basic editing for blogs, and getting started with Blogger.


Remember the blog we first started off with? Well, it's had some changes over the course of this little series, and now it's finished and ready for someone to blog their heart out (have a look):

Building a Blog With Blogger

Editing Your Blogger Design & Layout

NOTE: For information on editing and creating your blog using the Blogger in Draft, and the new Template Designer, please see this OTHER (newer) post!

Carrying on with the instructions for personalizing your blogger design, this post will explain the functions in the Layout tab.

Under the main layout tab you'll find a series of other pages: Page Elements, Fonts and Colours, Edit HTML and Pick New Template.

Page Elements

The page elements tab is where you'll find things like gadgets (other blogging platforms like wordpress call these add-ons "widgets", blogger calls them gadgets). Depending on the Blogger template you are using you will either have a "sidebar" on the left hand or right hand side, or in some cases you may have one both sides, with the post template in the middle. These instructions are for use with templates available directly through the "pick template" function in Blogger. If you've uploaded a custom template, these instructions may work the same.

In the following image you'll notice a couple of errors on the page - it doesn't say "error" but I know it is one. In the right hand column there is no "ad gadget" link at the top of the column, and there should be. If you follow the sidebar column to the bottom, you'll notice that it is cut off, with no access to any of the gadgets beneath the last HTML/Javascript gadget.


I have no idea why this occurs, but it has ocurred in my blogger account for a long time now. The way I get it to correct is to click the "view blog" link in the menu at the top of the page.


This loads the blog into the browser. In the navbar there is an option to customize your blog. If you click that, it takes you back to the layout page, but shows the correct editing functions now. This may not be necessary for everyone - many blogs seem to work properly, but if you find yours giving the same errors, try the fix I've posted.


To add different things to your sidebars, or above or below the main posting template you click the "add gadget" link for the area where you want to add that item. There are numerous gadgets available - a text box for just adding text, a link gadget for adding lists of links (in the sidebar of this blog you are reading, the menu was created using a links gadget), a picture gadget for adding pictures, an HTML/Javascript for adding things like codes (and javascripts, like adsense or others), there's even an adsense gadget.


When you click the add gadget link, a box opens with a bunch of gadgets in a list that you can scroll through and select the gadget you want to add. When you select a gadget to add, if it has parameters for you to set (like links to add, or a picture to add, colors, etc.) the gadget opens to allow you to make these entries, and when you click save, the new gadget appears in your sidebar.

Adding gadgets to your footer, below your header or at the end of the posts template works in the same way.

To make changes to your header, like replacing it with a picture or changing the title that displays, select the edit button on the header (right below the navbar). If your template allows images to display instead of (or behind) the text for your header the option will be here to upload an image, and to decide if you want it to be instead of the title, or behind the title. If you have a header image that you've already added text to, then you would want choose "instead of", but if you just have a picture and still want to see the title of your blog, then you would select "behind".

You can make changes to the colour of your navbar so that it more closely matches the colours selected for your blog, or so that it contrasts. Click the edit button on the navbar and select the choice you want for your navbar color.


Fonts and Colors

To go beyond just adding gadgets, you can set the fonts and colours in your blog by choosing the fonts and colours tab. The opens an editing box above your blog. On the left you'll see a list of the items you can change the colours for in your blog. Different template choices allow different options - some allow changing the background colours, while some don't. As you make the colour changes the results will display in your blog below. Once you are satisfied, click save.


Edit HTML

This one I'll leave til the next post.

Pick New Template

This option allows you to browse and select the standard blogger templates to preview how your blog would look before opting to change it. When you click the Pick New Template link, the templates page opens. To preview a different template, click the radio button in the one you want to see and then select the preview link below it. It will show you how your blog will look using that template.