Consult a personal injury and auto accident lawyer for free

Accidents and injuries are caused almost every day to a person whether it is just a minor, or major one. Sometimes a victim can be traumatized not knowing whom to consult to handle and fight their case.

If you're based in Austin, Texas and in-case of injury through negligence from third parties, you can consult an Austin Personal Injury Lawyer. The law firm of O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath is committed to providing superior client and legal Representation. Experts in personal injury and auto accident law, their professionals will fight for your complete recovery. They welcome clients to bring forth questions and encourage inquires to see what can be done best by them. They are experienced to deliver high quality expert advice even on the most complex cases. Consultations are free of charge around the state of Texas, at a time and place most convenient for their clients.

O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath – Personal Injury Lawyers – 808 West Avenue, Austin, TX. 78701 – 512-494-9949

Bridging the gap: Introducing the AdWords Content Specialist team

Do you ever wonder who at Google helps advertisers understand which websites are relevant for their placement-targeted ads?

I'm happy to say that this is one of my goals and also one of my team’s goals. My name is Lindsey Kurz, and I manage a team that helps advertisers understand how to best use AdSense sites in the Google Content Network to reach their marketing objectives. We focus on educating advertisers of all sizes on Content Network best practices, and how they can find success running campaigns on AdSense publisher sites.

You, our publishers, help our advertisers by offering high-quality inventory. My team’s job is to help advertisers understand how to make the best use of that inventory. One example of how we do this, is by helping advertisers understand how to connect with users of a site. For example, when someone’s reading an article, what kind of ad do they want to see? Chances are, they're browsing for information, so an ad promoting how to “learn more” may perform better than an ad asking them to “buy now." My team helps advertisers understand these differences to create the most relevant ads for your users. These ads then go through our targeting algorithms and standard ad auction to compete to appear on your pages.

Look for more posts from my team over the next few weeks. We’re excited to share with you more details about what we suggest to advertisers. We’ll talk about the specific recommendations we provide, such as advising advertisers to use a Placement Performance Report to optimize a Google Content Network campaign, along with more broad suggestions, like changing messages to reach different audiences.

Posted by Lindsey Kurz - AdWords Content Specialist Manager

Troubleshooting your AdSense for search box

We hope you found some useful tips in our troubleshooting series for AdSense for content. Today, we’ll take a look at some tips for implementing your AdSense for search box, to avoid some common issues.

• Are your search results hosted on your own webpage? When implementing your AdSense for search box, you have the option to display the search results either on a site hosted by Google or on your own webpage. If you choose the second option, make sure you select an existing site to host the results, such as www.example.com/searchresults. Once you've selected a site to display the search results, hit 'Submit and Get Code' and you'll generate two sets of code:
  
  1. The first is for the search box, to be implemented on the site where you would like to place the search box
     
  2. The second piece of code has to be pasted on the results page

Please be sure not to place the two sets of code on the same page, as this will prevent the search box from working correctly. Also, note that the option to host the result on your own page is not available for Blogger sites.

• Is your AdSense for search code nested within FORM tags? A form tag is used to create an HTML form for user input, such as text fields, buttons, and checkboxes. The code you receive for your search box uses an HTML FORM to submit the search queries. In order for the AdSense for search code to work properly, it can't be nested within another set of FORM tags on a page. To implement the AdSense for search feature on your page, please paste the code into your pages outside of any existing FORM.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Site maintenance on Saturday, March 20

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 5pm Saturday
Dar es Salaam - 8pm Saturday
Chennai - 10:30pm Saturday
Singapore - 1am Sunday
Sydney - 4am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Troubleshooting tips part IV: Ad controls and filtering

We understand that when showing ads on your site, there may be a few you'd like to prevent from appearing. There are a number of ad control and filtering tools in your AdSense account, which we've listed below to help you determine which ones are right for you.

• Competitive Ad Filter You can enter the specific URL of an ad into the Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from that site from appearing on your pages. If you'd like to block ads coming from an entire domain, enter a top-level domain such as www.example.com to block all ads that link to subdirectories below that domain.
  
  
• Ad Review Center The Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab in your account, lets you review and filter any placement targeted ads that are appearing on your pages. You can filter ads by type (text or image), or by individual ad groups and advertisers.
  
  
• Category Filtering To use the category filtering feature, you first have to enable the Ad Review Center. Category filtering allows you to block ads from up to 8 categories such as dating, politics, and weight loss, from displaying on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they're in English, French, German, or Spanish, regardless of how they've been targeted to your pages.

If you still see filtered ads are appearing on your site after you've used these features, please take note of the following:

• Ad filters should become effective within 30 minutes, but in rare cases might take up to 48 hours to be effective. Review the information in our Help Center for more information.
  
• If you use both AdSense for content and AdSense for search, and wish to filter an ad from appearing in both products, make sure that you've entered the correct URL in question in both filters.
  
• If you display ads from more than one AdSense account on one page, you need to filter the URL(s) in both accounts.

That brings us to the end of our troubleshooting series for AdSense for content. Stay tuned next week for tips on troubleshooting issues with AdSense for search.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Site maintenance on Saturday, February 20

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Johannesburg - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 11:30pm Saturday
Ho Chi Minh City - 1am Sunday
Brisbane - 4am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Holiday wishes from the AdSense team

We'd like to wish you a Happy Valentine's Day from all of us on the AdSense team.

And if you're following the lunar calendar, we'd also like to wish you a Happy Chinese New Year!

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense team

Thanks for your feedback on the AdSense Product Ideas page

Back in December, we invited you to submit and vote on product ideas for AdSense. Thanks for participating and voicing your opinions! We received over 600 ideas, and now, we'd like to follow up on what we're doing with them.

We've sorted through and categorized your ideas, which ranged from suggestions such as additional ad format types to new payment methods, and we recently shared them with the Product Management team. Our product managers are now looking into a number of these ideas and are evaluating whether they can be incorporated within our current product roadmap. We're focused on responding to your feedback, but it might take a little time before you see the features we choose to include because product changes require time to build and test across all the accounts and languages we support. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Also, we noticed a few ideas on the Product Ideas page that relate to existing features in AdSense, so we'd like to take a moment to highlight some of them here:

1. You suggested: Show a list of sites displaying ads from a specific publisher ID to prevent malicious activity.
   
   We recommend: Try the Allowed Sites feature to protect your account. You can enter the URLs of sites you own, and earnings from only those sites will be recorded in your account. When you opt in to this feature, we'll also show you a list of URLs that haven't been added to the Allowed Sites list, but where your ad code is appearing. Please keep in mind that if you create additional sites in the future and would like to earn from them, you'll need to add the URLs to the Allowed Sites list in order to be credited for valid activity.
   
   To get started with this feature, visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSenseSetup tab. You can also find more information in our Help Center


2. You suggested: Create an index of AdSense sites so AdWords advertisers can easily find sites to target.
   
   We recommend: Try the Publisher Center within Google Ad Planner to provide advertisers with information about your sites. You can claim sites you own, customize their descriptions, and add categories that describe your content. In addition, you can share your Google Analytics data to provide advertisers with insight into your traffic levels. Recently, we added the ability to display a clickable badge on your site that will take interested advertisers directly to your Ad Planner profile. Any publisher can use this feature, but please note that the interface is currently only available in English.
   
   To claim your sites in Ad Planner, follow our instructions and visit our Help Center.


3. You suggested: Enable more flexible Custom Search options.
   
   We recommend: Try the Google AJAX Search API or the new Custom Search Themes feature for additional customization options. These features will allow you to control the branding of the search box and change or enhance the look and feel of your search results to match your site.
   
   For more information on these options, we recommend visiting the Custom Search blog and the Developer's Guide for the Custom Search API.

Thanks again for all of your ideas and votes -- stay tuned to Inside AdSense for the latest news and product updates.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

Better contextual matching

As an AdSense partner, you know that Google is continually making improvements to the way we match ads to your content so that users see even more relevant ads, which should help you make more money over time.

A "referral URL" is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.

Let's see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I'm using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.

To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they're part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).

We've recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we're doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user's browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.

This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let's assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.

Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams' continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website.

Posted by Rebecca Illowsky - Associate Product Manager

More webinars coming your way

We've just published a new webinar schedule for the next month. In our live webinars, we'll highlight changes you can make to your ad implementation in order to maximize your AdSense revenue. We're also trying something new with our upcoming webinars: we've set up open Google Moderator discussions, where you can raise questions related to the specific webinar topic or vote on questions from other participants. We'll then answer your questions live in the webinar.

To sign up for our webinars, please visit our Help Center. Even if you're not able to attend the live sessions, we'll make sure to upload each webinar recording within 24 hours of the event.

Posted by Siobhán McCormack - AdSense Optimisation Team

Donate your AdSense earnings to help Haiti

As you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.

We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.



Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.

Photo courtesy of PIH

You can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.

As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

Troubleshooting tips part IIa: Ad relevance and targeting

Last week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting.


If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:

• Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
  
  
• Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
  - audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
  - mp3 files (.mp3)
  - images (.jpeg, .bmp)
  - Macromedia Flash movies
  - Java Applets
  
  To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.
  
  
• Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.

We hope these tips help you resolve any targeting issues you experience with your ads. Next week, we'll take a look at some other reasons why you may see irrelevant ads or PSAs on your site, and how you can best resolve them.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

Troubleshooting tips part I: Implementing your ad code

Today, we're beginning a troubleshooting series to help you diagnose and solve common issues with your ads, search boxes, and account functionality. We're kicking things off with a look at how to correctly implement your ad code and an explanation of why ads may not appear on your pages at times.

First, the best way to ensure ads are served correctly is to copy and paste the code exactly as it's provided in your account. Changing the code and manipulating ad behavior aren't permitted by our program policies, and in most cases will prevent your ad from appearing at all.

If you've noticed that your ad units aren't showing ads, here are a few things to check for:

• Did you just add the code to that page? Relevant ads should appear on your pages shortly after you add the code, but sometimes it can take up to 48 hours for ads to show. This is because our crawler has to visit your page and determine its content so we can serve targeted ads.
  
  
• Does the code on your page match the code in your account? Make sure to copy the code exactly as it appears in your account, and paste it within the body tags of your HTML code. Be sure not to make any changes to the linebreaks of the code (e.g. pasting the code all in one line) as this will break the code and prevent ads from showing entirely.
  
  
• Are you using an HTML editor? Publishers often use a design-enhanced HTML editor like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage (aka WYSIWIG, "what you see is what you get" software). If you use such an editor, you may see errors if you paste your ad code into a WYSIWYG view such as the "Design" or "Layout" view. For the ads to function properly, you'll have to copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your webpage using the editor's HTML view or HTML insert function. Check for any additional tags inserted by the system or changes in the linebreaks.
  
  
• Are you using a content management system (CMS)? If you have trouble implementing AdSense with a specific content management system, we recommend searching for the name of the CMS (eg. Drupal, WordPress) and 'AdSense implementation'. You can also ask in the forum if other publishers have mastered similar problems, or contact your program provider directly.
  
  
• Are the ads inside nested frames? While you can choose where to position your ads on your pages, be sure to avoid embedding the ad code in excessive div tags or nested frames. Depending on your browser settings, implementing your ad code in this way might prevent ads from appearing correctly.
  
  
• Is JavaScript enabled in your browser? Ensure that you have JavaScript enabled in your browser, as this is necessary to view ads! If you're having trouble seeing the ads, please also check for any conflicting JavaScript on your site that might prevent ads from showing.
  
  
• Is your page dynamically generated? If you'd like to implement AdSense ads on a dynamically generated site -- for example, a site with session IDs or pages behind a login -- you should take a look at this Help Center entry for more information on how to receive targeted ads.

In the next part of this series, we'll provide tips to help you troubleshoot ad relevancy and targeting issues.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

An update from AdSense about the response to Haiti Earthquake

We've heard from many of our AdSense publishers about your concern for the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the efforts Google is making to help the people of Haiti respond to this catastrophe.

Google is donating $1 million to organizations on the ground that are rescuing those still trapped and providing clean water, food, medical care, shelter and support to those affected. For more information on Google's efforts and opportunities to get involved, please visit the Google Blog.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Team

Site maintenance on Saturday, January 9

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

Istanbul - 8pm Saturday
Sao Paolo - 4pm Saturday
Oslo - 7pm Saturday
Nairobi - 9pm Saturday
Auckland - 7am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Happy New Year

Wishing all our publishers a very Happy New Year!

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

Happy Holidays

We'd like to send our best wishes to all our publishers around the world. Wherever you're spending this holiday season, we hope that it's filled with much love, warmth, and happiness.



Happy Holidays!

Posted by Dia Muthana on behalf of the Google AdSense Team

Keeping your account secure

We understand how important your AdSense account is to you. You need to sign into your account to generate ad code, manage the appearance of your ads, view your reports and check the status of your payments. However, keep in mind that your AdSense account is actually part of your Google Account. This means that you may have several Google products, such as AdSense, Gmail, AdWords, Blogger, etc, all tied to a single sign-in.

We take account access issues very seriously and would like to take some time to provide a few simple tips to help you protect your Google Account.

If you're having trouble signing in to your Google Account, usually resetting your password will do the trick. To add additional security to your account, you should update your alternate address, choose a strong security question (if you have Gmail), and add a mobile number to your account so Google can text you a recovery code if you ever forget your password. Also, if you have a Gmail address, we recommend providing a current secondary email address where you can receive our password-assistance email. If you don't have any of these set up, it will be difficult for us to verify your identify and reset your password, so please take some time to update your security options.

If resetting your password doesn't work, you can try filling out our account recovery form. We can usually restore access in a few hours if you're able to provide the necessary information to prove ownership.

Here are some additional tips to ensure that only you have access to your account:

• Create a strong password and security question. Your password shouldn't be something that someone else can easily guess. The same goes for your security question. If someone that knows you can answer your security question, then it's probably not a good question. Review these tips for suggestions.
  
• Don't share your account password with anyone. It may be tempting to share your password with your friends or family, but don't do it, especially if it's your personal account. If you need to create an account that is accessed by several people, make sure that the account is not tied to any products that contain personal information.
  
• Don't respond to messages asking for your username or password. Google will never send you an email, IM, or any other communication asking for your sign-in information, so don't respond to any messages asking for it.
  
• Be cautious of fake sign-in pages. Always look for www.google.com/adsense in the URL. If the URL is different, don't sign in on the page. If you think you may have signed in using a fake sign-in page for AdSense or any other Google product, please reset your password as soon as possible to prevent abuse of your Google services by a third party.

You can find more tips in the Google Accounts Help Center.

Posted by Diane Velasco - AdSense Policy Team

Ken Uston

Uston burst onto the scene in 1977 with the publication of The Big Player, co-authored with Roger Rapaport. In this book, Uston exposed the secrets of Al Francesco's big player teams. The book caused a falling out between Al and Ken that lasted for years, as Al felt Ken had betrayed his trust as well as his teammates.

But this book caused an upheaval in the world of card counting, changing the ways that professionals looked at the blackjack and attacked it. Three of the most successful international blackjack teams-the Tommy Hyland team, the MIT team, and the Czech team-all were founded in 1978, the year after Uston's book was published.

Al and Ken later patched up their relationship and Uston went on to start many blackjack teams of his own. He was a personality on a grand scale, who legally challenged the casino industry in the courts of both New Jersey and Nevada. His playing career spanned two decades of play at the highest levels, and included card counting, BP teams, hole card techniques, and concealed computer play.

Ken is also the author of Two Books on Blackjack, Million Dollar Blackjack, and Ken Uston on Blackjack.

He died in 1987 at the age of fifty-two.

A note about a messaging change in your AdSense account

Today we're changing some messaging in the AdSense interface concerning your earnings, and we wanted to give you some more information on why we're making this change.

In order to be more transparent about how our system calculates earnings, we've added the words "Estimated" and "Finalized" next to "Earnings" throughout your account. Rest assured these terminology changes don't reflect a change to the way your finalized earnings are calculated. It's simply intended to give you a clearer idea of what's our estimation of your earnings and what's finalized.

As you may have noticed in the past, the earnings on the Overview and Advanced Reports pages may sometimes differ from the earnings listed on your Payment History page. This is because earnings on your Overview and Advanced Reports pages reflect initial estimations based on our records. We aren't able to provide finalized earnings on these pages because they still need to be verified for accuracy, a process that takes place a few days after the end of every month. The finalized sum is then posted on your Payment History page by the 10th of the next month.



While we can't say how much these amounts would differ for any one publisher, most publishers will not see a significant difference. Again, please keep in mind that this is only a display change, and that your finalized earnings will continue to be calculated and credited to you in the same way as before.

Updated to include screenshots and Help Center links

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team