Site maintenance on Saturday, January 15

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PST. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense account 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
Alexandria - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 11:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 1am Sunday
Perth - 2am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

New features now available in the new AdSense interface

Since our post announcing the open beta of the new AdSense interface, we’ve been working on a few additional features, listening closely to your feedback about how we can continue to improve. We’re very excited to announce a few changes that will further enhance your AdSense account management experience:

1. We’ve changed the default metrics shown on the Home and Performance reports pages based on strong feedback that most of you prefer to view your earnings at the page level rather than by ad unit. As a result, we’ve switched back to page level metrics, and those of you who wish to see ad unit CTR and other ad unit level metrics can now do so under the Performance reports tab.
2. The Allow and block ads drop-down selector, which lets you see your blocking features by product, has been updated to call out the product name. This makes the interface a lot more clear for those of you using multiple products.
3. Ad unit impressions and queries have been renamed ‘Ad requests’ to better describe how this statistic is used for AdSense for content, AdSense for search, and other products. An ad request is recorded each time an ad unit on your site requests ads from Google's servers (for content ads) or a search query is made (for search ads). We report an ad request each time a request was sent, even if no ads were returned and public service ads, backup ads, or no ads were displayed instead.
4. Based on feedback, we’ve updated the terms found under the Ad types section of your Performance reports to include text, image, rich media, animated image, and flash. Previously, rich media ads were referred to as HTML and animated image was called dynamic image.
5. For publishers using our AdSense for games and AdSense for video products, you can now create and edit channels and see reporting for these products. Learn more about AdSense for games and AdSense for video.

Thanks again for all of your great feedback. We’ll let you know as we continue to roll out new features. In the meantime, keep the comments coming on the blog or in this Forum discussion!

Posted by Vincent Zanotti and Guillaume Ryder - AdSense Engineering

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part V: Unoriginal content

Fiction: Publishers can put ads on auto-generated pages or other copied content that was not created by them.

Fact: We don’t allow sites with auto-generated or otherwise unoriginal content to participate in the AdSense program. This is to ensure that our users are benefiting from a unique online experience and that our advertisers are partnering with useful and relevant sites.

In the past, we’ve talked about tips for maintaining an AdSense-friendly site with user-generated content (UGC). Today's topic is not only applicable to UGC sites, but also to all websites affiliated with AdSense for content.

Sometimes we come across sites that are using software to generate automated content. These sites might look like normal news sites, but the information is completely plagiarized. Scraping content and passing it off as one’s own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies. AdSense depends on maintaining a balance between user, publisher, and advertiser experience. We strive to protect that ecosystem as much as possible by encouraging and protecting unique and relevant content.

Obviously publishers and Google are concerned with revenue generation, and when original traffic encounters quality content, it’s a match made in heaven. The best way to engage users in the long term is to engage users. Provide your opinion on the news, offer a different service, organize your site in a way so that a user is captivated and moved.

Take some time to familiarize yourself with these webmaster quality guidelines, and if you find sites within our network that are clearly violating these guidelines, feel free to report it to us.

One last thing: a quick, but well-deserved thank you to the majority of you that continue to inspire us with your great, unique, and creative content. Keep up the awesome work!

Posted by Cecelia Choi - AdSense Policy team

Fresh year, fresh start

Welcome to 2011! Though it may be hard to stick to all of your New Year's resolutions (we can’t say no to donuts either) we want to help keep you on track by giving you ten quick and easy AdSense resolutions you can be sure to keep:

• Use the new AdSense interface to get more insight, control, and efficiency with your account.

• Enable text and image ads so all available advertisers can bid to appear on your site.

• Use wider ad units which are more reader-friendly and used by more advertisers

• Place ads above the fold and maximize your coverage with three standard AdSense for content ad units, three link units, and two AdSense for search boxes on each page of your site.

• Use channels to measure the outcome of any tests you run by grouping and tracking ad units as you choose.

• Turn those channels into ad placements so advertisers can pick specific groups of ad units on your site that they want to target.

• Go through the AdSense checklist to learn about new AdSense features and brush up on your program knowledge.

• Follow us on Twitter to get quick updates on the latest features, AdSense tips, and Google highlights.

• Join the conversation in the Help Forum to connect with other publishers and get your questions answered.

• Bookmark our troubleshooter so you can quickly diagnose and fix the issue should ads stop showing on your site.

Over here in AdSense, we have some resolutions of our own to keep. Our top priority is to focus on growing and strengthening our relationships with all of you, our valued publishers. We’re working on ways to make Google’s publisher solutions more seamless and integrated, so you don’t miss any opportunities to maximize revenue and enhance your online content. The recent launch of the new AdSense interface is just the start of what the new year holds for future improvements. We’re constantly innovating and we encourage you to do the same.

We hope these tips help you start the year off with a bang. And treat yourself to a donut with the extra revenue you earn -- we promise not to tell.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team