Google Updates Their Adsense Policies

That’s right, Google has issued their 2007 update on policies to be followed by websites using Adsense. Of course, Adsense is Google’s contextual ad service where websites can place Google ads on their site and earn revenue. The revenue you can make from Adsense is pretty good in the scheme of things, so webmasters who use it should go take a read of the new policies. Google does kick off sites that break their policies, even if they are not as picky as Yahoo, who kicks off sites for having international traffic when YPN can’t pull off geo-targeting on their own.

Here are the highlights of their new changes:

• Sites cannot place images next to ads to in any way direct a user’s attention to the ad. That means no arrows or “click here” images. Nor any trick placements to make people click on your ad thinking it is a valid part of your site navigation.
• You can no longer display Adsense on any site which is displaying competing ads from any source which looks like an Adsense ad. Now, this is pretty wide and sweeping. It basically means Google is going to hold you in violation if you are using Yahoo Publisher Network on the same site. Period. There is some confusion on this policy, though, because the way it is phrased, you could use a competing ad as long as it looks different than Google ads. I’ll have to wait to see if this gets clarified. Plus, it says specifically *site*, which means they won’t even accept you trying YPN in a totally different section of the same site. That is ridiculous.
• You can now place up to two referral links on your site in addition to the ads.
• Sites can no longer ask for anything before displaying a referral link. For example, you can’t ask for a user’s email address before referring them to the Google Pack.
• If you use Google’s custom search engines, you can only display one additional ad unit on the page along with the search results. This is because the search results already come with ads (just like when you search Google normally).
• You can’t run Adsense on any site involved with selling student essays or term papers. I think this one is a little humorous, actually. For a company who got into hot water over scanning books and making them searchable, its ironic as hell that they’re banning these types of sites from their Adsense program.
• You can’t display ads on sites that in any way break copyright law.

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