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Many people were asking if the WesternUnion payments will be free or if they will deduct any amount from the earnings. Google officially announced it today and said “it will be free”. It’s a great news too, because WU service charges are quite high. Up to 15% in some cases, so if you get $100, they could take $15. I guess Google will be absorbing that cost for some time.

Also this payment option is available to these countries only: Argentina, Chile, China (Mainland), Colombia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, or Romania.

Tip: For those who have never used WesternUnion, when you go to bank, ask for WesternUnion and fill up the yellow form (to receive) and not the green one (to send). Sender will be, First Name: Google Inc. Last name: empty

P.S I have been getting my AdSense payments for the past one year through WesternUnion. I was one of the bloggers who was in the AdSense WU beta.

If you are selling only few products on your site and you would like to use PayPal and Google Checkout as the payment gateway, then FatFreeCart.com is for you. It’s free and it does not need any registration. You just need to cut and paste the code to your site, put in your product details and you are done!

Full Features

1. Handles shipping, handling, tax.
2. Handles up-to 3 option variables.
3. Can handle all currencies supported by PayPal (16) and Google Checkout (2).
4. Passed your site’s Google Analytics data to Google Checkout
5. Simply set the product price to 0.00 to let buyer enter her own amount!

Thanks to Robin for the heads up. www.fatfreecart.com

Malaysians (and maybe other countries too), another good news for you. Now you can get paid through WesternUnion for your Google AdSense earnings. What does that mean? That means, when Google releases the payments you can get your payments immediately, no need to wait for 10 days for your checks to arrive. And another 30 days for them to be cleared anymore.

In Malaysia, WesternUnion services are available at most of the CIMB Bank branches and in some Pos Malaysia branches (here is the list of branches with WU).

Here is how you set your payment options, go to:

My Account > Account Settings > Payment Details [edit]

After you click [edit] you will be displayed the following screen. On this page, choose Setup WesternUnion Quick Cash option, as shown below.

How much they charge for this?

It’s FREE.

Will the local bank charge anything?

No, they won’t.

What are the steps for getting paid with WU?

After you have chosen, Western Union as the option for your payment. At the end of the month, you will be given MTCN (Money Transfer Control Number). MTCN is a 10 digit number that you need to show when you are picking up your payment from CIMB Bank. You will also need to bring your IC or Passport, and of course you need to know how much money you are withdrawing. Finally, you need to know Google Address.

Again, you need to have these for picking up your payment:

• MTCN
• IC or Passport
• Amount to be received
• Sender’s Address (it’s Google here)

Google Address:
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

Can you withdraw from any CIMB Branch?

Yes you can, as long as you are inside the territory of Malaysia, you can withdraw from any branch of CIMB or Post Office (only some post offices have this, so please check).

Where to get your MTCN?

In the beginning Google used to send it through email. But now it does not. So don’t wait for the email. Just make sure to login to your AdSense account at the end of the month. Go to My Account > Payments History page as shown below.

Then click on the payment details. Make sure you click on the correct month:

Then you will be displayed your payment details like this:

So, good luck! By the way, your money will be available for 30 days in WU system. After which, if you do not withdraw it will be credited back to your Google AdSense account.

Tip: For those who have never used WesternUnion, when you go to bank, ask for WesternUnion and fill up the yellow form (to receive) and not the green one (to send). Sender will be, First Name: Google Inc. Last name: empty

I believe there will be an official PR from Google about this shortly. Update: they did check here.

If you have a website that is optimized for mobile browsers, then you can now make money from your website content. AdSense is now available for mobile phone sites.

To get started:
1) Sign in to your account.
2) Select the AdSense Setup tab and click on AdSense for mobile.
3) Follow the instructions to customize your ad unit for AdSense for mobile.

One restriction: You can have only one ad per page. Still it’s better than nothing.

www.google.com/adsense

Will Google eventually buy Text-Link-Ads.com? Decision will depend on Google’s long-term strategy, strategy that deals with growing concern regarding the paid links services, i.e services like TLA which offer services to sell text links on your sites. Now there are literally hundreds of them. And thousands of people are using these services.

Google’s Stand

At the moment, what Google is saying is: “Do not use these services. Instead use my Google AdWords.” Or that’s the message what people are getting from their recent war on paid links. Currently Google seems to be loosing the war. Nobody seems to be following Google’s order, only the sites which make more than 90% of their income from Google AdSense are taking a heed.

Google claims that “paid links” are being used to manipulate Google algorithm, be it to get a higher position in the search engine results or increasing the rank of the page artificially - through buying text links from high ranking sites.

To combat this, Google asks you to report your paid links to them, or to add rel=”nofollow” to the links. When Googlebot sees nofollow on any link, it will automatically ignore the link and do not index it. Obviously advertisers do not want that, and publishers comply with advertisers’ requests. When there is a demand, there is a supply!

How to use rel=”nofollow”:
<a href="http://www.advertisersite.com" rel="nofollow">Paid Link</a>

Google says Advertising is not wrong

Google says we are not against advertising, but we are against the manipulation of our system. What that means is, if you want to buy text links from a site with the purpose of getting more people visit your site, or to make more sales, or to just make awareness of your product. Google says that’s fine with us, but please use rel=”nofollow”.

So according to Google, there is nothing wrong with buying text links and getting a traffic to your site. But they have a problem if your SERP (Search Engine Results Position) increases or your PageRank increases due to your purchasing a link (and of course if you do not use rel=”nofollow”).

But that does not go well with advertisers. Because advertisers (and everybody who has a website) want higher SERP and higher PageRank. Because one of the objectives of buying paid links is to improve your SERP for certain keywords, so that you won’t keep advertising again in the future. So that, next time, people can find your site through Search Engines easily. So ordering a paid link that has rel=”nofollow” on it, is like drinking a Coke that has no gas in it (not carbonated). It simply has less ROI (Return On Investment) than a link that can boost your SERP and PageRank.

Google is screwing its own algorithm

By telling people to report their paid links, Google has somehow distorted the meaning of paid links and made it much more difficult to recognize them at first sight. Because now, afraid of being penalized by Google, bloggers and publishers have resorted to hiding their paid links under different titles. People are also using image titles for their advertisement sections, hoping that Googlebot won’t notice it when it spiders.

Has Google banned TLA?

TLA founders seem to think so, since searching Google for “text link ads” do not return any result for Text-Link-Ads.com. They used to come up on No.1 spot before.

Let’s assume Google had banned TLA. Then why would it allow TLA to use its AdWords to advertise the site? Below is the screenshot when you search for “text link ads”. TLA’s ad comes up on top.

You would say, money is everything, that’s why Google allows it. But iWEBtools’ Google Banned Checker service does not think so. In fact, it thinks TLA is not banned from Google (see below).

Also TLA’s official blog does come up first for the search “text link ads blog“. If Google really did ban TLA, then its blog should have been banned too right?

This can mean TLA is not banned, but somehow has lost its SERP or it’s being partially penalized by Google. Probably for selling text link ads. You can loose your SERP for various reasons, one of them is being intentionally targeted by a black hat seo expert.

Summary

Time will show if Google will stop its WOPL (War On Paid Links, I just made up that acronym ;), and if it will eventually takeover Text-Link-Ads.com. I personally believe, Google shouldn’t be acting as a big brother on internet and asking people what to do on their sites. Instead Google should spend more time in their Labs and come up with a better algorithm. What do you think?

Here is a Google Cheat Sheet consisting of two pages, it’s in PDF. (Download PDF).

You can preview First Page and Second Page before downloading.

The two pages of Google Cheat Sheets cover info on: A list of all Google domains, PageRank, Google Form Elements, Google Services, Query structure to access directory listings and many more.

Download PDF here

Sometimes publishers get banned because their AdSense code gets hijacked by someone. A good example would be somebody that does not like you. He opens your site, views the source code of the page, copies your AdSense code into some illegal site, and publishes it. Next thing you know, you are banned from Google AdSense. Your account is terminated.

Well in order to curb this problem, Google has (finally!) introduced a new feature in Google AdSense. It’s called Allowed Sites, these are basically your sites that you own and use AdSense ads on them.

Now you can list your sites under “Allowed Sites” section and be secured from AdSense code hijacking.

We’ve added the Allowed Sites feature because we’ve learned that some AdSense publishers are concerned about potentially malicious behavior from others on the web, such as stealing their ad code and placing it on an inappropriate site. By offering this feature, we allow AdSense publishers more control over which sites or URLs can have their AdSense code. Google Support.

Take note

If you want to list your sites under this option, do remember to list all your sites. If you forget any of them, then the earnings that you get from those unlisted sites will not be counted. Basically you will be giving away all your earnings from unlisted site to big bro Google! Unlisted sites will be considered someone else’s sites. So be careful when you use this feature.

We use Google everyday, but how many of us use it effectively? As you know Google has many search features but nobody uses all the features fully. Usually a typical Google user would just type words in the search box and scan the results. But this is not the most effective way to find something.

I would like to cover some of the most important search rules in this post. They are simple rules but when used correctly, will get you the gems in the search results.

1. Searching by phrase

By default when you search Google it will show you the results that have the keywords that you searched for, as long as those words are mentioned in the page url, page title or page content it will show up in the Google results. For example searching Cool CSS Tools would display results that have these three keywords. Results might look like this:

However when you put your keyword between ” and “, the results will show only the pages that have all three words together (eg: “Cool CSS Tools“)

2. Search by filetype (i.e pdf, doc, exe..etc)

This is a great way to find resources, especially if you are looking for specific file types. For example typing Introduction to Investment:pdf in Google and hitting search will return (some) results in PDF format. Why some only? Because it is possible that there might be no pdf files for the search-term that you have just entered.

3. Finding Word Definitions

When you are searching for some definition you can just type deine:SEARCHTERM and google will display the definition of that word. For example typing define:www and hitting search will show lots of definitions from various sites for the word WWW, see screenshot below.

Extra Tip: -word +word

When you use minus_and_keyword like this -cool css tools, Google will only show the results (pages) that do not have words cool on it. All the pages that have cool word in it will be dropped. That means Google will only display CSS Tools related pages that do not contain Cool word on them.

As for the plus sign before the word, it will find pages that have that particular word. Eg: +Cool CSS Tools, this will show pages that have Cool keyword on them.

Your favorite feature
These tips should be enough to use Google effectively. If you have your own favorite feature that you use often, share with us in comments.

All Google SE Features www.google.com/help/features.html

It seems like Google is fed up from getting emails from publishers saying that they have clicked accidentally on their own ads. Finally, Google said: “Accidents happen so no need to inform us”.

As most of you know, our program policies state that publishers are not permitted to click on their own ads for any reason. For this reason, we’ve received many emails from publishers letting us know that they’ve accidentally clicked on their own ads. If you’re one of these publishers, we truly appreciate the efforts you’ve made to monitor your account and keep it in good standing. However, we do understand that an accidental click may occur from time to time, so there’s no need to contact us each instance this occurs.

I hope this won’t send a wrong message to some publishers, please note that making money on your own ads will still be short lived. Google will still be monitoring publisher accounts for fraud clicks.

Source: Inside AdSense

Have a great idea? Are you determined to make that idea a reality? Well, maybe you should check Google Patent Search first, just in case. Just to be sure if someone else didn’t already develop the same product or have patented the idea. If it is a big budget project, this could save you lots of money, so check the patents first at www.google.com/patents