How to Track Google Merchant Center Revenue

October 20th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Google Merchant Center makes it easy to follow your online sales. If you use Google Merchant Center to sell products online, monitoring your incoming revenue is paramount. Keeping an eye on your sales can quickly get complicated, but fortunately, Google Merchant Center has a very user-friendly interface for tracking all payments. Once you have your Google Merchant account connected to your bank account, you will be able to start receiving payments. As soon as that happens, you’ll be able to access your revenue reports.

Difficulty:Moderately Easy1

Sign into your Google Merchant Center dashboard.

2 3

Review the information within the Payouts page. This page will display all financial information relating to your merchant account. Available financial information includes recent sales, sales still awaiting payment, funds paid to your bank account, refunds and chargebacks.

4

Click “Payout Details” or “Transaction Details” within the “Download Data to Spreadsheet” section. This will create a printable report that you can save to your hard drive. The report can be opened by any spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

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Filed under: Google Information · Tags: Center, Google, Merchant, Revenue, Track

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Does Google Index WordPress Drafts

October 11th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Google uses spiders or robots to “crawl” the Internet for new pages to add to its index. Google’s indexes allow the servers to more quickly find relevant search results, such as your blog posts, without having to pour through every Web page at the time of the search.

According to Google, its spiders find new pages to add to the index by searching for links on pages that already exist in the indexes. If you have save your WordPress post as a draft, it is not yet published on your blog there are no links to your draft for Google’s spiders to discover. Thus, your WordPress drafts will not become part of Google’s indexes until after you publish the post and the spiders have a chance to crawl your site once more.

WordPress does provide temporary viewing addresses for drafts so that you can preview them before publishing. However, even if you created a link to this temporary URL from a page on your blog that already exists in Google’s indexes, WordPress only allows the blog author and administrators to view drafts. WordPress will not grant access to the content of the post to Google’s spiders and your draft will not become part of Google’s indexes.

When you maintain a blog or website with WordPress, you want visitors to be able to find your site by searching for relevant terms. For example, if your blog is about graphics and you create a post about the best editing programs, you will benefit if your blog post appears in Google’s results for “graphic editing software.” Thus, you should ensure that there is a link to every blog post, page or other content on your site so that Google can add this content to its index and you can increase exposure to your blog. WordPress drafts do not contribute to this exposure. If you are creating a time-sensitive or surprise blog post, you will not want Google to index your drafts before you publish the post to the public.

WordPress does allow you to change the status of a post back to “Draft” after the post has been published. You may do this if you have accidentally publish an incomplete post or published a draft too early. It is possible that Google could crawl your site and add the post to its indexes during this time. It is impossible to pinpoint how much time Google requires to index your site. According to the company, spiders “regularly crawl the web to” add new pages to the index. However, Google gives no concrete time-frame and states that factors such as PageRank, links to a page and other factors affect crawl frequency. In the event that you accidentally publish a WordPress draft, Google may not see it to add it to the index if there are fewer links to the post.

Filed under: Google Information · Tags: Drafts, Google, Index, WordPress

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How to Make a User Enter a Captcha Before Redirecting

A captcha is an effective way to cut down on spam email and message postings. The increasing amount of personal and financial information on the World Wide Web has made it an attractive target for unscrupulous marketers and criminals. A large number of groups operate “spiders” or “bots,” which are programs that travel through the web; they can be used to harvest personal information such as email addresses, post unwanted advertising messages in blogs, or create accounts for various purposes.

One way to stop these programs is by using a “captcha”, which is a simple word or pattern recognition test that the user must pass to continue. Captchas are designed to be easy for humans to solve but difficult for computers, thus making automated use of these sites difficult. By far the most popular captcha program is Google’s free reCAPTCHA. For others, see the links in the Resources section.

Difficulty:ModerateAdministrative access to your sitePHP language supportAn HTML editor1

Visit recaptcha.net and create an account (or sign in with a Google account if you have one). Click “Add Site”, enter your site’s domain name, and click “Create Key” to obtain public and private keys. Make a note of these keys, or leave the page up in your browser; you will be using them to communicate with Google’s reCAPTCHA server.

2

Download the PHP reCAPTCHA library from the Google Code site listed in the References section below.

3

Unzip the PHP reCAPTCHA library and place the file “recaptchalib.php” into the folder on your site that includes the page with your form.

4

Open your HTML editor and create a file called “verify.php”.

5

Put the following code at the top of “verify.php”:

In the third line above, replace “your_private_key” with the private key you obtained in Step 1. Leave the quote marks in place. Toward the bottom, in the “else” section, place the code that you will use to redirect the user after the test. Save the file.

6

Open the page on which your form appears in your HTML editor.

7

Create a new

In the fourth line above, replace “your_public_key” with the public key you obtained in Step 1. Leave the quote marks in place.

8

Save the file. reCAPTCHA should now be working.

The Google Code site in the References section includes a complete guide to the reCAPTCHA plugin.

The public and private keys must be entered accurately (cutting and pasting is best). Do not confuse them, or the test will not work.

Your form needs to be set up to get its variables with $_POST rather than $_REQUEST.

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What Is a FeedBurner ID?

November 5th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Google FeedBurner is a free service that lets generate and manage RSS feeds for your website or blog. Each generated RSS feed has its own unique identification, which is quite simple to locate, as long as you know where to look. FeedBurner users and developers who take advantage of the service’s Application Programming Interface (API) should know where to find the ID, as it may be needed in blog plugins and applications.

A Google FeedBurner ID serves the purpose of identifying a particular feed. As there are millions of feeds “burned” or served up by FeedBurner, each one must be easily identifiable by their system, otherwise it would start serving the wrong content for each feed. Since Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner in 2007, ID numbers became identification names, which are generally chosen by the user when setting up the feed.

To find your FeedBurner ID for a feed you manage on the service, you’ll need to first log into the site. After you are logged in, click the feed title link. On the next page, click the “Edit Feed Details” link near the top. The text in the “Feed Address” field is your FeedBurner ID for that particular feed. It is unique for each feed and cannot be the same as any other feed.

Your FeedBurner ID may be required by plugins on different blogging platforms, like WordPress or Movable Type. It is useful to know where you can find this information, so you can easily input the information in the plugin’s settings page. However, sometimes a plugin asks for the full feed address, which includes the ID too.

If you are a software or application developer, you might need to access a FeedBurner ID with the FeedBurner API. If you have designed an application that requires user input of the ID, then you want to know where to find, that way you can give clear instructions to the user.

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Why Does My Google Earth Have Low Resolution?

Many Google Earth images are at a low resolution for reasons ranging from unavailability of high-quality images for a geographic area to cloud cover. For security reasons in some areas of the world, Google Earth will provide only low-quality, pixelated images that obscure details of buildings or important installations.

Since Google Earth’s introduction in 2005, Google has constantly updated its database of images to provide up-to-date, high-quality aerial images. Some are available in three-dimensional views. Google obtains the imagery from a number of sources, including satellites, airplanes, hot-air balloons and even model airplanes. Google uses the best imagery it has available, but some aerial images may be as much as 3 years old. Google Earth users can use program options to control resolution. The lowest resolution is 256-by-256 pixels; the highest available is 1,024-by-1,024 pixels.

Resolution available for a particular geographical area largely depends on Google Earth user interest. Large cities, major points of interest and historical landmarks generally can be viewed at higher resolutions, and sometimes in 3-D. An October 2008 PC World article reported some images available in resolutions as high as two feet per screen pixel. Remote areas of the world, including oceans and deserts, generally are less detailed.

Google Earth’s aerial images of certain areas are intentionally obscured for security purposes. For example, the roof of the White House is digitally altered to conceal security installations, according to a June 2009 article by Focus. Images of some military bases where buildings and other objects could be potential targets are pixelated. Among them are Reims Air Force Base in France, the NATO C3 Agency in Brussels, Belgium, and the NATO Air Base in Geilenkirchen, Germany.

Images of the nation of Israel are heavily pixelated, according to a June 2011 article by PC World. Israel is subject to what’s known as the “one-meter threshold,” which means that U.S. companies, including Google, can show images of Israel at no higher resolution than one pixel per square meter. The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision limiting the resolution of commercially distributed satellite imagery of Israel.

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How to Delete Your Favorites History From YouTube

October 11th, 2011 | Add a Comment

YouTube gives the user the ability to create a favorites list in which she can save her favorite videos, then quickly find them again. After you’ve used YouTube for a long period of time, your favorites list may contain videos that you no longer enjoy or want to watch. To reduce the list and keep it up to date, you can delete selected videos from the list, or delete the entire list and start fresh.

Difficulty:Easy1

Log in to YouTube, then click on your name at the top of the page and select “Favorites.” A list of all the videos you have added as favorites displays.

2

Check the box next to each video you want to delete from your favorites list. If you want to delete all the videos, check the box on the menu bar above the first video. A check mark appears next to each video you select.

3

Click “Remove” to delete the videos from your favorites history.

Bookmark any YouTube videos in your favorites list that you want to save, as you cannot recover your YouTube favorites list after you delete it.

Filed under: Google Information · Tags: Delete, Favorites, History, YouTube

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How to Use Google Earth on Your iPod Touch Without WiFi

November 9th, 2011 | Add a Comment

Google Earth, a program from Google that allows you to search for and zoom in on any location in the world, is available from Apple’s App Store and can be installed directly onto your iPod Touch. Google Earth requires an Internet connection to download information and images, which it caches on your device until you delete them or overwrite them. You can run Google Earth when you’re away from your Wi-Fi network but should pull up the data you need on-the-go beforehand so that it is cached and available sans-wireless Internet access.

Difficulty:Easy1

Tap the “Google Earth” icon to open the app while you have access to a wireless network.

2

Tap the “i” icon to open the options menu. Tap “Clear Cache.” This will purge your previous searches and free up space.

3

Zoom into the areas you want to cache for use when you’re away from your wireless network. For example, if you’re going to hike on a specific trail and want to use your iPod Touch to keep your bearings, zoom in on that trail to cache its images.

4

Start Google Earth like normal when you’re without Wi-Fi. You will be able to zoom into the areas and pull up the information you accessed last, which is cached on your iPod.

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