I logged into Google webmaster tools this morning and my shiny new blog is now verified. Google is at last now satisfied that I am the owner of a blog I created using the same email address that I had already used to login to Google webmaster central. Hooray! Isn't modern technology wonderful?
However the blog has still not yet been crawled. To help Google in this task I added a sitemap at this point. With a Blogger blog you can't generate a normal sitemap. Instead I clicked the "Add" button in the "Sitemap" column in the Webmaster tools dashboard, and entered the blog's atom feed URL (http://wwwgurus.blogspot.com/atom.xml in this case). Given the apparent inability of Google's systems to talk to each other I'm beginning to wonder whether I should manually add the URL to Google's queue as a belt and braces measure. For now let's forget about that and wait and see what happens.
There is now a single, hopefully relevant, AdSense advertisement placed over on the top right of the page. The one showing at the moment is about an affiliate website. I guess that counts as relevant.
Then I went over to http://www.google.com/adsense and logged into my new AdSense account for the first time. It says in a large font at the top:
Today's Earnings: US$0.00
In smaller print next to that it says "Your payments are currently on hold. Action is required to release payment." Obviously we are currently nowhere near Google's $100 payment threshold, so we'll come back to sort that out later. It does seem like we're in desperate need of some traffic though.
Filed under Adsense by on Aug 6th, 2007. Comment. 
Having made my first post I added an AdSense page element to the Blogger blog template. This prompted Google to ask me to sign up for AdSense, which of course I proceeded to do. I received an email from them informing me that "Your application has now been submitted for review and we will follow up with you by email in 1-2 days". A couple of hours later I received an email congratulating me on the fact that my AdSense application had been approved, but warning that "if Google has not yet crawled your site, you may not notice relevant ads for up to 48 hours". I headed over to Google webmaster tools and added the new blog URL (http://wwwgurus.blogspot.com) to my list of web sites. Sure enough the blog has not yet been crawled by Google. I figured Google's computers must be smart enough to realize that I own the blog, but apparently not. They asked me to add a meta tag to the blog header to prove it! I went back to the blog template to edit the HTML. Google thoughtfully asked me if I wanted to back up the existing template, and I gratefully accepted their generous offer. I added the Google verification meta tag just underneath the line that starts "<head>" near the beginning of the template and saved the new version. I then rushed back to Google webmaster tools and clicked the "Verify" button. Horror of horrors! Google tells me that verification is pending, "Our system has experienced a temporary problem."
Filed under Adsense by on Aug 5th, 2007. 1 Comment.
