Google AdSense Forum

Okay - so I'm wondering how they will enforce this requirement?

- A massive manual review of all publishers sites?

They are going after the template pages.

I'm reasonably sure I know what they mean by this, but the language they used leaves holes you could drive a truck through.

Is it safe to assume Google has data showing good performance with link units?

Or am I missing something?

I've been waiting for expecting the one ad link unit limit to be lifted. I never knew where they came up with a limit of one. But are we now going to see pages with three ad units and three link units on the same page!?

The new quality sermon is interesting. It's a bit fluffy, but I will say this. I've been redesigning one site and increasing its quality for the last few months, and each time I make the look and navigation of a section easier, my CTR jumps 10%.

Why doesn't Google offer more incentive to produce quality pages? Why not a case study? If it's going to say it's optional, the least it can do is provide data to motivate. After all, what is going to motivate publishers more than the bottom line?

Is the call to quality by Google a quality call?

OMG. I can only imagine how those pages that are fond of "blending" will look like in the future... Soon we will see three ad units and three link units plus a few referral buttons on pages. Will there be room for any relevant content above the fold?

As I noted somewhere else, Google is increasingly becoming the "one step ahead and two steps back" company.

Recent type examples:
- Ban garbitrage sites to increase quality, but at the same time disable any click tracking
- Ban more garbitrage sites to increase quality, but introduce a new rule of "up to three link units"

What's next?
- Allow ban by account, but reduce the number of filter slots to 3?
- Introduce better statistics, but allow to fully customize the ads for perfect blending? (cough)

They have made it clear that:

Webmasters can drive traffic from adWords to pages with adSense on them. They are not AGAINST arbiitrage which could result.

However the adWord ads should not be misleading and the landing page must have relevant and substantial content. ( interesting integration between adWords and adSense side of things).

They also donot have a problem with webmasters with small ecommerce sites, using adSense to defer a part of the adWords cost. ( see their example in the blog). This is another example of acceptable arbitrage.

These changes should keep dishonest and MFA type of publishers on their toes. They would never know when the axe could fall. Makes the whole thing very risky. They might no longer give out ' earned money' after banning.

A small ecommerce site may not carry the full range of products and may serve only a niche. Visitors that arrive thru. adWords may exit thru adSense resulting in revenue for the site owner.

For ex. A book store may sell only latest fiction. The adWords visitor may be looking for 'text books' or 'rare books' and on finding that the store does not stock them, exit via adSense to a site that does have them. At times, a large no. of visitors may not find what they are looking for creating an 'arbitrage' opportunity for the ecommerce store. This may be bad for sales and may call for a better targetted adWords campaign but that is beside the point.

Ofcourse, it does mean that the adWords tarffic is low cost on a/c of a better QS on the landing page and the advertisers may be paying much higher on account of more competition leading to expensive keywords.

This is the adsense model that I work by. However, I don't use adwords as my site was established before adwords.

I was reading lens reviews on a respeccted German photo site yesterday and clicked two AdLinks by accident because they were blended into the content so well. The site had useful information, but AdSense had obviously become the tail that wagged the dog, and I'd never link to the site or encourage others to visit it.

I agree.

Now they need to address the people who put up misleading AdWords ads that lead to pages that don't contain AdSense ads. Otherwise, half of the problem will still exist.