Google Custom Seach Engine = Brilliant! CSE Troubleshooting Tips
The Google Custom Search allows a simple addition of code to your site that creates a customized search engine run by Google. This is often added via your adsense account (under ads / search) and it is a brilliant way to add search to you site that helps monetize your peeps with google advertising placed next to a list of your web pages.
HOWEVER I just spent a bit too much time fixing a simple problem so I thought I’d start a list of Google Custom Search Troubleshooting tips:
ONE: It’ll only show indexed content so be sure to create a sitemap for Google. Also a good idea to place some links to your pages from other sites so Google can find them more easily.
TWO:
be sure to add *.* to the specific URLs you want to custom search. For our RetireUSA retirement custom search I needed to add this to the URLs box to make sure it picked up all of our indexed content:
http://www.retireusa.net/*.*
http://blog.retireusa.net/*.*
Check out our Retirement Search tomorrow at RetireUSA.net
Please subscribe to the feed
Adsense/content seems to be more trouble than it’s worth. And note Google’s new “threshold” criteria: they don’t release any profits until the blog’s made over $100! Now, maybe for a high roller blog like Duck.com that’s every few days. For many that’s a few months (or year).