If you're a subscriber to the popular Google AdSense service, you'll be interested to read the email that I received today from the AdSense team about video advertising. What you need to ask yourself is what kind of video ads would actually work on your site and whether you want to think about creating your own video advertising too. [tip: if you haven't yet signed up for AdSense, please start with my tutorial Getting started with Google AdSense]

Anyway, here's their email to me...

Q: Dave, I've been reading your book and am highly motivated by hearing about people who are making more than just a few dollars on Google AdSense! But I've been talking with some folk at different marketing seminars and they tell me about how I should "hide" my AdSense advertisements in my design so that I can trick people into clicking on my ads when they try to move around my site. I dunno, though. Is that a good approach?

I think that there's a huge problem with being unable to differentiate editorial and advertising, actually, but I realize that I might have an unusual perspective on this because I've spent many years in the magazine and publishing world. Let me explain...

Dave, does your domain name impact your SERPS (search engine results placement)? That is,if you use a nonsense name, will it negatively impact your search engine ranking? Would "www.thebestsearchengine.com" rank better than "www.google.com" for the query "best search engine"?

I have a free lising with Google. I don't understand why my listing only appears if someone does a search on Google (Cheryl Ann Floral Design Conshohocken PA) If I elimanate the town and state which is Conshohocken PA I am not listed. I don't know how to fix this. I would like to be listed under (Wedding Flowers Philadelphia PA)
(Flowers Conshohocken PA) (Flowers Montgomery County PA) etc.

I've been running my new weblog -- blog.getyouhealthy.com -- for a few months now and as far as I can tell Google still hasn't stopped by to visit my site or index me. I've heard about something called a "sandbox" but I don't know what that is and whether I'm in it. If I am, how do I get out of it? If not, why else might I be missing from Google?

I've just spent much of the last few days discussing Google with a sharp reporter from Fortune Small Business. We spent most of our time talking about strategic directions for the company, asking questions about how free wi-fi, Open Office via Sun Microsystems, and the Google toolbar all fit together (and, yes, they do), but what's most stuck in my head is trying to figure out the answer to the question:

    Froogle + Google Base = ?

For a long time I've paid close attention to Froogle, Google's shopping engine, waiting for the company to put some energy into really making it a full member of the Google family. But still, even with yet another facelift, it languishes and isn't discussed or used very much, as far as I can see. And yet compared to just about any other online "shopping engine'", Froogle has two fabulous things going for it from a vendor's perspective: inclusion in Froogle is free and Froogle = Google.

If you've signed up for Google AdSense on one of your sites and are ready to expand onto a second site, do you need to ask Google for permission, or can you just start displaying AdSense code on the second site? The answer is that you can just expand your AdSense horizons without checking in, as long as you ensure that each and every site you use meet all the criteria of the AdSense program. it's important to make sure you don't err, however, because if you add AdSense to an inappropriate site, you risk being kicked out of the entire program, which most assuredly wouldn't be a good result. So, take the time and please read up on:

    Adding Sites to your Google AdSense Account

And if you haven't yet signed up for Google AdSense, please pop over and read my popular tutorial Getting Started with Google AdSense.

Dave, as per your suggestion and encouragement, I have taken the plunge and signed up for Google AdSense. Now I've added it to my site and am getting some traffic and an occasional clickthrough. But I really don't understand the nuances between all the data shown in the report; can you walk me through the overview report in AdSense?

Dave, I've been reading your book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business on Google but you did not answer one question I have. Is it kosher to present Google ads on your site AND present ads from Yahoo or anyone else? Do they insist on exclusivity or can you mix and match?

We recently added Adsense for Search to a bunch of pages on our site.

I have noticed that the average amount earned per click via Adsense for Search is much lower than the average for Adsense for Content.

Is it the case that Google pays different amounts for each? The ads that show on the search results pages seem to be similar or identical to ads that appear on other areas of our site, so I am not sure why there would be a significant differents in average click earnings.

Dave, I've been dabbling with Google AdWords with mixed results, but I have found a few Web sites that I think are just perfect for my ad campaign. What I'd like to do is run ads just on those sites. Is that possible, and if so, how do I do it?

Without a huge amount of publicity, Google has indeed rolled out what they call site targeting, which lets you bid on having your advertisement run exclusively on a specific Web site or set of Web sites. Pretty cool idea, really!

I recently purchased a web site that was ranked number 1 on Google. Within 24 hours of the ownership change, Google dropped the ranking significantly to page 5. Does Google look at DNS changes, and could this be the reason for the lower ranking? Any other ideas of what could have caused this? FYI, the ranking in Yahoo was unaffected.

My initial reaction to this question was that you were trying to draw a casual relationship from correlational data (yeah, my Masters degree comes out in weird ways sometimes :-) ) and that this was basically a case of Google doing a "dance" coincidentally with your ownership change.

I thought it would be useful to ask some real SEO experts, however, so I sent out your query to a search engine marketing list I'm involved with, and the resultant answers were, well, darn surprising!

Dave, rumor has it that Google's introducing a new "advertise on this site" feature for the top performers in the AdSense program, but I can't seem to find any specific information about it, and when I go to the AdSense site, there's no information about it. Do you have any information about this?

Dave, maybe you can explain something for me: my Web site Freedom For Animals.org apparently has a PageRank of two out of ten (2/10), and I don't really understand what that means. Does it mean, for example, that my organization's site is #2 out of 10 hits?

If I place a link on my business' home page to my weblog and then make sure to update my weblog frequently, will the "Googlebot" come a-knockin' on my home page just as frequently as my blog?

The reason I ask is because in your book Growing Your Business with Google you indicate that Google cares about pages, not sites. This seems to suggest to me that if I update my blog frequently, Google will come to my blog page frequently, but not to my site.

How can I convince the Google robot that my keywords use the word cat and my page is optimized with the word "cat" more than "cats web". I want Google search to list me under the word "cat": I am listed at the number 3 spot on the first page of a Google search if you use the words "cats web" or #1 on the 1st page if you use "cats web page"

Should I leave everything alone or should I go for the better listing? My site is "A Cats Web Page of Rawhawk & the Hooligans" at rawhawk.net. I have tried to relist with Google a few months ago but, the search stayed the same?

Q: I logged into my Google AdWords account to explore the possibility of tying my advertisement to a few new keywords, but I can't figure out how to ascertain how much it costs to get to the #1 position for a given keyword. Can you help me out?

Dave, the sites that are linking back to me are using a graphical "badge" rather than a textual link. This is a graphics link back, which according to your Google book, doesn't rank as highly as a text link. Yet, my audience loves these. Now what?

Just finished your Google book and I'm dismayed to discover that my web site may be a link farm not a portal. The goal of this now updated site is to have students talk to other students via reviews of the handout links by doing "reviews", like Amazon.com

My Google rank is currently 7, so I must be doing something right, but a link: report only shows 70 links to the site. Yet I know that there are many more. What gives? Is my site considered a link farm? and thereby not getting indexed by Google?

Dave, you're plugged in, can you tell me what's new at Google? I try to keep track of everything they're doing, but it's just about impossible what with all the news about Google the company out there...

Dave, I'm new to the web, paid a company back in March to register my new website with all the search engines. As I am now reading your book (Growing your Biz with Google) in August, I see that my website has a 0 page rank! does this mean that I am not even registered with "Google"? Did I get ripped off?

Do you think this will breath some immediate life into the site? (ie: traffic?) Thanks in advance, Dave. Love the book so far! Also, when you agree to add other links to your website, where do you put them? Should I create an entire page just for links? And where is the best place to get into reciprocol linking when your site is relatively new? Does reciprocol linking work as well as building a review site? (ie: one way linking?) and lastly, how do you suggest registering a new website in the future so that I don't have this problem again?