adsense and geocities

[Vespasian]

I have a site hosted on geocities that would be successful with adsense, if I can use a geocities site for that.

1. Can I use adsense on a geocities free-hosted site? (The free geocities hosted sites have a popup ad on them)

2. Can I use adsense on a geocities hosted site where I have paid their hosting fee to keep the popups off? (however the URL would still be "geocities.com" like a few million other geocities hosted sites out there.

Please don't tell me I need to get a domain name and host it myself. I realize that is much the best. But if I change it now I'll lose all the links going in to a PR6 site.

[Stark]

If the only reason you aren't moving is because of inbound links, are you not able to put out a 301 redirect from your old site to your new? That way all the links should transfer to your new site

[jomaxx]

I think the standard response from G. is that you can only run AdSense on domains that you control - i.e. not on free webhost sites such as Geocities.

[fidibidabah]

Yeah, the whole losing PR thing I can see would be a hassle..

but seriously, it costs like negative money to get hosted these days. I can think of a registrar and a hosting company, off the top of my head, that would cost you about $30 to get the domain name, and hosting for a year.

[Jenstar]

Geocities currently runs Overture's SiteMatch on many of their free sites (it could be a rotation on all of them) on the right side pop-down thing they use on the sites. So it would be a violation to run AdSense on those pages, even if AdSense didn't have a problem with free domains.

When you apply for AdSense, they do a whois check, and may question it further if it doesn't match the information on the AdSense account.

Also, a few months ago, there was another member who was told to remove AdSense from all his Geocities pages.