AdSense policy changes means a lot of work for some publishers
January 18th, 2007AdSense have again made tweaks to their Online Program Policy. Some of these changes are good, some are going to mean a lot of extra work for existing publishers.
The Good:
Referrals - You can now have two referral links (or images) per referral product. For a blog this means that you could have, for example, a Firefox referral in the sidebar and another embedded in a relevant post. This is a good move!
Copyrighted material - The AdSense team have clarified their position on the use of AdSense ads on pages containing copyrighted material:
“Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”
So if you see your content on someone else’s site, surrounded by someone else’s ads, you can do something about it!
Sites selling/distributing student essays - Can’t have AdSense on these sites now
The Bad:
Use of images around ads - This is now a big “no!”
- May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks
- May not place misleading images alongside individual ads
Ads on search pages - If you use Google Search on your site, the results page can only have 1 ad unit on it (apart from what’s shown by the search results).
Competitive ads - Do you use Google AdSense and, say, Yahoo! Publishing Network (YPN) ads on the same site? Well, now you need to be careful:
“Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.”
Basically what this means is that you’ll have to make ads from different providers look different to your AdSense ads. This could mean a LOT of work for some users. If you are faced with a lot of work it might be easier to go with one publisher and ditch the others.
Further reading: Problogger | JenSense
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 5:12 am and is filed under Adsense Tips, Make money with Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
