It is a bundle of Google services that are useful to website owners. The program lets them configure these services directly from a single control panel. A web hosting provider, for example, can provide a management console that lets its customers configure email settings and different Google services.
Google Services for Websites includes the following services:
We might add more Google services to the program in the future. To learn more about the benefits of these services to your customers and the technical requirements to implement them, see the Technical Workflow page.
You can integrate with any number of optional Google services. You can integrate with just one service, a combination of services, or all available services. However, we recommend that you integrate with all the offered services, for the following reasons:
You simplify web publication for your customers by providing useful web tools in your control panel. And you can help drive traffic, increase their user retention rates, and improve the usability of their websites.
Also, you are eligible for referral fees when your customers sign up for AdSense and upgrade from Google Custom Search to Google Site Search.
No, Google Services for Websites is a free product, and it must be available to all your customers at no additional cost to them. You may not use it as a feature of premium packages.
Google reserves the right to suspend an account or change the program for any reason.
The Webmasters Tools Access Provider (WTAP) program is now part of the Google Services for Websites program. Current partners of WTAP are automatically enrolled in the new program and can now provide additional Google services to their customers. Customers who already have accounts with Webmaster Tools must opt into the new services; they may not be automatically enrolled without their permission.
To be a Google Services for Websites Access Provider, you must be able to complete the verification steps on behalf of your customers. If you can’t do that, you won’t be able to use the necessary Google APIs to provide your customers with Google services.
If you do not host websites, but you can provide login information on behalf of other people and have write access to their accounts, you can apply for the program. Explicitly include that information in your application.
Nothing! Your company and customers pay nothing for this service.
No. Since Google Services for Websites is a free offering, you may not charge your customers for the service. However, if your customers choose to upgrade from Google Custom Search to Google Site Search, you might get a referral fee.
Google offers referral fees to partners for customers who sign up for AdSense and for customers who upgrade from Custom Search to Site Search. To receive the referral fees, apply to participate in the Google Affiliate Network. Members of the network receive a partner ID that they embed in their URLs for service sign-up and upgrade pages. The partner IDs track customer enrollment.
While you are free to announce your participation in the program, Google will not issue a quote or a joint press release.
Once you have been approved, you will receive the badge, the product icon, and the branding guidelines.
Once your application has been approved, you may use the approved product and program messaging included in the branding guidelines.
If a customer no longer uses your company’s servers, you may remove their accounts from your domain, but you must give them the opportunity to download their configuration information.
They can still create new ones through you. In fact, a single website can be managed
through multiple accounts; however, the accounts are not linked.
If you need additional accounts, log into your Google Apps account and make a request for more accounts.
Webmaster Tools provides an easy way for your customers to submit URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of their webpages on Google. To learn more, see the About Webmaster Tools page.
A Sitemap is a list of the pages on a website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps Google discover pages on the website, including URLs that might not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process. To learn more about Sitemaps, read the Webmaster Tools Help Center.
You can submit Sitemaps directly to Google using Webmaster Tools.
No, but generating, updating, and submitting Sitemaps for your customers’ websites provide a lot of value to them. Submitting Sitemaps is one of the best ways to help search engines discover content. It also improves the indexing for custom search engines created under the same Webmaster Tools account and enables your customers to refresh the Custom Search index on demand (that is, they can have their websites recrawled at the push of a button).
Well, you could create your own Sitemap generator, or you can use the Google Sitemap Generator, which is is a Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using the Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps from URL lists, web server directories, or access logs.
Custom Search is hosted search for your customers’ websites. They can use it to create a targeted search experience around their website, a group of partner websites, or any arbitrary slice of the Google index. They can even change the look and feel of the search box and the search results page. If they also sign up for AdSense for Search, they can earn revenues from the ads that are displayed in their search results page.
To learn more, see the Custom Search page.
Site Search is a paid upgrade from Custom Search. Your customers can choose to not display ads, customize the branding and the look and feel of the search box and the search results page. It offers results in XML format, giving your customers greater control over how results are presented. Site Search also comes with technical support.
If your customers upgrade to Site Search with your Google Services for Websites control panel, you might be eligible for a referral fee.
To learn more, see the Site Search page.
Search has become an essential tool for web navigation. Users are now accustomed to finding a search box on a website; it is the first thing they turn to when they cannot find what they are looking for in the navigation links. If they can’t find the information they want quickly, they leave! High quality search on websites increases user retention, user satisfaction, as well as improve conversions and sales of products and services.
Google AdSense enables your customers to earn revenue from displaying relevant ads. To learn more, see the AdSense Tour.
Your customers can make money from displaying ads on their webpages and alongside their search results. Custom Search already displays ads, so if your customers sign up for an AdSense account, they can share the ad revenues with Google. They can choose to use only Adsense for search or sign up for AdSense for search and content on their websites.
If your customers do not want ads to display besides the search results, they have to upgrade from Custom Search to Site Search.
No, your users can associate their existing AdSense accounts with the custom search engines they created using Google Services for Websites.
However, if a customer doesn’t have an AdSense account yet, you can provide a service for creating a new account, and it will be automatically associated with the customer’s search engines.
No, only your customers can earn revenues with Google for serving contextual ads on their webpages and alongside their search results. However, you are eligible for referral fees for new AdSense accounts that were created through Google Services for Websites.
Yes, and before you start your implementation, you must meet the main requirements for using the AdSense API, which includes the following:
After you have implemented the AdSense piece of your service, you must request an implementation review. Your implementation must be fully functional, thoroughly tested, and ready to launch.
To learn more, see the additional technical and policy requirements, as well as the AdSense API review process.
We currently do not support Google Apps Premier Edition for this program. Use an account with Google Apps Standard Edition with a different domain.
If you’re already using Google Apps for your customers to provide services such as email, your customers can use the same account credentials to create accounts with Google services, such as Webmaster Tools, AdSense, and Custom Search.
If you’re already using Google Apps for your employees, we recommend that you use a different domain to provide accounts to your customers. The premier edition of Google Apps for your employees has a per-account cost; get the standard edition so that you won’t have to pay for premier accounts for your customers.
If you can’t find the answers to your questions here, post them in the Google Webmaster Help Forum.