Jenstar - 4:07 pm on Apr 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

OK, here is a breakdown of the changes. I had been reading the AdWords terms recently, and this one is much shorter than the AdSense terms ;)

Essentially, the major change is adding impression fraud/spam into the terms as a prohibited use.

Under 2. The Program, the following was added:

Google may modify the Program or these Terms at any time without liability and your use of the Program after notice that Terms have changed indicates acceptance of the Terms.

This change mimics the same part of the AdSense terms.

Under 3. Prohibited Uses:

Changes in bold:

You shall not, and shall not authorize any party to: (a) generate automated, fraudulent or otherwise invalid impressions or clicks

It seems they are finally writing impression fraud into the actual terms. For those who don't know what this is, it means an advertiser will go and turn off campaigns related to a certain keyword area, then continuously query those same keywords in Google. This results in a lower CTR for those competitor's ads who are still displaying for those keyword terms. Then when the advertiser turns his/her ads back on, they will likely be above the competitor's listings, while not neccessarily paying more, because they now have a better CTR, since they did not receive any of the fraudulent impressions. Sometimes, competitor's ads can actually get disabled because they have fallen below the active CTR level threshold.

Under 4. Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability

This was reworded and changed into specific point form:

Google disclaims all guarantees regarding positioning or the levels or timing of: (i) costs per click, (ii) click through rates, (iii) delivery of any impressions on any Partner Property or Google Property or sections of such properties, (iv) clicks or (v) conversions for any ads or Targets.

That's all folks :)