15 Common Mistakes by Google Adsense Publishers that Violate Terms of Service

Google Adsense program is a popular web advertising program which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.

On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. Believe me, if I can see it in a 5 seconds gaze! – so can the Adsense guys. And if they do, you are on your way off the program. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.

1.  Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad unit and 1 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches – Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing – Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported – Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

16. Never forget these 15 points.

Related Posts: Google Adsense – Best Tips and Tricks Collection

 

A decade on | Google’s Internet Economy | Analysis

It’s the success story to beat all internet success stories.

Ten years ago, on 7 September 1998, two young graduate students at Stanford University incorporated a company with the (then) odd-sounding name “Google”.

Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are billionaires. Their company is hugely profitable; between April and June this year alone, it reported a turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn) and generated a net profit of $1.25bn (the first quarter was even more profitable).

Not bad for a company that makes its money being a broker for and publisher of online advertising.

The secret of Google’s success, of course, is the algorithm driving its internet search engine. In fact, it is so good that it has entered our dictionaries.

People don’t search the internet any more, they google it.

The secret sauce

Some critics accuse Google of being a one-trick pony and warn that competitors, newly emerging and potentially better search engines, are a mere mouse click away. 

But Google’s secret sauce has more ingredients than its clever way of organising and ranking search results.

Equally important is the technology underlying the vast data centres that give Google the scale, speed and efficiency to serve its rapidly growing number of users.

And finally there are Google’s two money spinners: AdWords – which puts relevant advertisements next to Google’s own search results – and AdSense, the revenue-sharing deals that put Google’s context-driven adverts on third-party websites.

The clever thing here is Google’s restraint. It auctions advertising space not to the highest bidder but the most relevant advertiser, making Google users happy and generating more lucrative click-throughs to the websites of the advertisers.

Google’s real ambition

Google may be a money spinner, but the company says it has much more high-minded aims than making a fast internet buck.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” claims its corporate vision statement.

Note the word universal. Whether high-minded or not, it is this “Google everywhere” ambition that makes it such a successful company.

Over the years, Google has been releasing a steady stream of innovative tools and services – some of them developed in-house, many others bought in from start-ups: Gmail, Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, Picasa for picture editing, Google Earth and Maps for location-based search and display of information, Blogger, YouTube’s video service … the list is seemingly endless.

Not that long ago this looked like random growth. But as these services get a more coherent look and feel, the pieces of Google’s puzzle are falling into place.

Every search we do, every tool we use helps Google to gather more information and organise the artefacts of our knowledge society.

The price to pay

Providing an entry point to Google’s search engine at every level keeps feeding our Google habit, and creates a virtuous circle: the more information Google has, the better its search results, the happier its users, the higher the click-throughs on adverts, the bigger the profits, the more money for new “free” services that entice users to surrender yet more information.

It may leave us happy and Google profitable, but is it a corporate disaster waiting to happen?

Messrs Page and Brin may famously – or notoriously – promise that Google “can make money without doing evil”.

But with Google hoarding all this personalised and traceable information in its vast data centres, issues of data safety, privacy, and corporate Big Brothership are looming large.

The chrome Android

Google is expanding because the internet is expanding. The definition of where the internet ends is getting hazy, with devices like fridges, digital picture frames and mobile phones becoming part of the internet-enabled world.

The company’s next steps are already mapped. This week it launched its very own internet browser, called Chrome.

Today’s browsers were built to show web pages, says Google, not to be platforms for complex applications.  Chrome promises to bring stability to our online experience – and the more computing happens on the internet, the more information Google can gather.

Coming shortly is an even more important piece of software called Android, Google’s (Linux-based) operating system for internet-enabled telephones.

Google makes the same business case as for  Chrome: today’s smart phones were not designed for the mobile internet, so Google steps into the breach.

Partner or rival?

The company started ten years ago by two students has the size to do it all.

At the end of 2007 it had 16,800 employees, and is reportedly hiring about 100 new people each week. 

But with Google spreading its wings and complementing more and more parts of our lives, a rapidly growing number of companies in ever more industries have to ponder whether this “search engine” is a partner, a competitor or a destroyer of business models.

Google’s company motto could quite as well be: “Anything you can do I can do better – and for free.”

It leaves even Google’s largest rivals constantly stressed out – whether it is Microsoft (who saw the beta launch of its new browser Internet Explorer 8 overshadowed by Chrome), or ailing web portal Yahoo, which was forced to agree a revenue-sharing deal by outsourcing some of its advertising to Google.

Even the people who happily pay Google top advertising dollar are getting worried. They complain that Google’s dominance could result in a lack of choice, not least since the company bought its way into the world of traditional display advertising on the web, through the acquisition of Doubleclick.

Triumvirate

This is especially true during the current economic downturn. Google expects that its revenue is going to hold up, because its advertising service is highly targeted and its success measurable. It’s the old media with their mass medium approach that have to worry.

And to reassure investors, Google executives are pledging that they won’t fall into the Yahoo trap of trying to turn Google into a media company.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told Conde Nast Portfolio that “one of the general rules we’ve had is ‘don’t own the content; partner with your content company'”.

But even here the lines are blurring. Is there a lot of difference between “old media” publishing the pictures and videos supplied by news agencies, freelance photographers and their own audiences, and Google News or YouTube?

For now, the Google juggernaut rolls on.

The two founders keep driving the company’s technical excellence, and Mr Schmidt – a veteran of the technology industry – ensures that the money keeps coming.

This triumvirate has made an informal deal to stick together for at least 20 years, says Mr Schmidt.Plenty of time for Google to secure its position as the lynchpin of our internet economy.

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https://tarunreflex.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/exploring-lively-googles-virtual-world/

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https://tarunreflex.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/downlaod-google-chrome-google-incs-new-browser-review-download/

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