Two more Ways to Lose your AdSense Account
For years, people discovered that ads under the title generate better click-through-rate. If you look around, this ads placement is very common. Now Goolge just flashed a yellow card to this practice.
In an almost humorous blog title, “Another look at optimizations”, Google’s official AdSense blog indicated that this could violate the TOS in affecting users’ and advertisers’ experience. A guideline was spelt out as,
Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
Examples given regarding the violating title are “Dallas Business Opportunities” or “Today’s Hot Deals”.
We consider this guideline most threatening to many bloggers. To save the effort on inserting ads, bloggers build the ads insertion in their template, adding the best-performing medium rectangle ads unit right after the title. While you’re blogging away, your title may inadvertently imply that the ads followed are not ads. Boom, there comes an email entitled “Google AdSense Account Disabled”.
The blog also lay out another guideline.
Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.
Again this directly opposes the AdSense optimizating Google taught us over time in numerous case studies (in the “Inside AdSense Group” updates): blending the ads into the content. The example shown on the official blog is a little extreme. Intepreting this guideline can swing wildly.
Nevertheless, if you care about your AdSense extra income, you should take this blog as a warning and really “take another look at your ads optimizations“.
You can find Google’s official blog here.
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Classified under Prevention.
By Bob on April 7th, 2008.