Adsense placement: How far are you willing to go?
Joel Comm, also known as Mr Adsense, posts regularly on his site AskJoelComm.com videos shot on his seminaries about Adsense placement. Although i watch them as often as i can, i tend not to agree with some of the parts. For example, let’s take the video bellow, posted on July 15th, 2007.
First of all, there’s an example here where a guy used and Adsense Link Unit together with it’s content menu. The ads are placed above and bellow are the content link, with similar fonts and colours. perfect blending you might say, but isn’t this a little misleading? I guess it is but it’s not really breaking any of the rules, so i guess it might be fine.
On the other hand… he has a couple of examples where he states placing images next to Google Ads is OK. Well, according to Google’s terms it’s not, and i quote: "May not place misleading images alongside individual ads". I’m not a native English speaker but this means you’re not allowed to, right? Or are just the moving images misleading? I frankly doubt it…
With the Google Ads becoming more and more used on the Internet, people try to trip their visitors into clicking on the Ads without really wanting this. Is it OK? Well, i guess not, but since everyone does it, we have to do it also. But, the question is, how far are you willing to go with stepping over Google’s line of terms and conditions and are you willing to risk getting banned for a couple of extra bucks? I’m not. Are you?
Ads that are mixed into your navigational structure will lead to accidental clicks.
Accidental clicks lead to an adsense ban.
Not worth the risk IMO.
I totally agree with you
Just got banned by AdSense for making too much money on Feb 19, 2008. All websites that we had were generic business websites and everything was legal. Google Adsense’s email indicated a ‘bad business model’. Our translation is ‘We are paying you too much money’. Go figure. We had been up and running for over a year until our websites were getting noticed by Alexa.com and Google AdSense’s mysterious partners.