Loading other people's website in frameset with Adsense

Is it legal and allowed by G?

[rubenski]

Hi everyone,

Today I bumped into a website that uses other people's content to earn Adsense money, but not in the usual scraper-site way. The webmaster has created a frameset consisting of two horizontal frames, the upper one containing some page external to his/her domain and the lower one containing Adsense ads.

Is that allowed? I have read the program policies and can't find anything that explicitly prohibits this. It smells fishy though. The ads have white backgrounds as do most of the external pages so that it becomes very hard (or impossible) to see that they are actually on different domains and belong to different people.

Some of my friends' pages are in there, so what should we do. Or what would you do? I know one thing for sure. I would never want to make money in this way.

[edited by: rubenski at 1:13 pm (utc) on June 28, 2005]

[ownerrim]

if it smells like s*$%, it probably is. i would report it even if G ultimately does nothing about it.

[Broadway]

I'm not expert on this but isn't there some "frame busting" code that you can place in your HTML so to make it so your page cannot be contained in a frame?

A Google search of WW pages should find you some threads on frame busting.

[rubenski]

Thanks for the advice. I have forwarded your tip to my friends. However, it feels a bit unfair that they have to clutter their code with Javascript because someone uses their pages to make money. I will just report it to Google and see what happens. I am getting so tired of 15 year olds trying to make an easy buck of my (and other people's) hard work.

[ann]

word to the wise, use the break out of frames. More than one place frames your site, even ask jeeves.

Put it between the head tags. This one does not disable the back button so it does not break adsense t&c.

<script language="JavaScript1.1" type="text/JavaScript"><!-- // hide from old browsers
if (parent.frames.length > 0) top.location.replace(document.location); // Escape from any referring site's frame, but preserve one-click "Back". --></script>

Ann

PS

found it on another section of the forums, forget who worte it.

[rbacal]

No, it's not "legal". One must either own or have permission to place adsense code on the content. It's in the TOS.

[Broadway]

Well then just another form of cheating that Adsense turns a blind eye to.

[joeduck]

Well then just another form of cheating that Adsense turns a blind eye to.

They want to kill off these sites - they hurt the program's credibility - but they are proliferating like well fed rabbits.

Click on THE BAD GUY'S adsense "ads by google" and report them via the new process for comments. For more read jenstar's info about the new adsense spam reporting process.

[rubenski]

I haven't heard back from G since I sent my email two weeks ago. I suppose they are allowing you to load someone else's site in a frame and display ads with it. Furthermore it seems you are allowed to design the frame so that the 'ads by Gooooogle' sentence is invisible and it seems they are also allowing you to display ads on 404 and thank you pages now. Straaaange. I wonder why I have typed up 120 pages of content if I could have just taken yours. Perhaps because it feels better...

[rubenski]

I haven't heard back from G since I sent my email two weeks ago. I suppose they are allowing you to load someone else's site in a frame and display ads with it. Furthermore it seems you are allowed to design the frame so that the 'ads by Gooooogle' sentence is invisible and it seems they are also allowing you to display ads on 404 and thank you pages now. Straaaange. I wonder why I have typed up 120 pages of content if I could have just taken yours..

[Dayo_UK]

Was the website Ask Jeeves?

He he - sorry :) - OK they dont put Adsense in a frame by your site - just their own form of an advert (eg their search bar)

[Alioc]

Was the website Ask Jeeves?
He he - sorry :) - OK they dont put Adsense in a frame by your site - just their own form of an advert (eg their search bar)

And I'm so glad to bust their frames out!

[infect]

beaten to the ask jeeves joke. dang.

[JaySmith]

It is against program policies and TOS to do this. Their policy states that if your ads are in a frame set then they must be in the frame that contains the main document. You cannot place adsense in a standalone frame regardless of who's document is in the other frame.

I believe it is also against their tos to hide the "ads by gooooogle".. I remember reading something to that effect.

[jomaxx]

Actually you can use frames for your own site. That option is explicitly supported. But having framed ads appear next to someone else's content is just begging to get kicked out.

<added>Frames in general are definitely allowed. I *think* there's a valid way to put the AdSense code in a different frame from the main content. I remember someone posting here that he has done it with Google's approval. But I don't use frames so I don't know the ins and outs of how it works.</added>

[AdSenseAdvisor]

If you see a site you suspect is violating the AdSense TOCs, you can email [e-mail] directly. I assure you that we take these reports seriously.

To protect the privacy of our publishers, we generally can’t respond to you with updates on the outcomes of these investigations. This may be why you did not receive an update from AdSense, rubenski.

Also, as JaySmith mentioned, it is indeed against AdSense program policies to display Google ads in ways that cause ad text or links to be obscured. Google ads must be displayed in their entirety. If you are interested in viewing all of the program policies, please see:

[google.com ]

Thanks for bringing these issues up. It’s always good to hear so many publishers who are concerned about the quality of the network.

-ASA

[Celicaphile]

Aren't there some free hosts that do this like tripod or angelfire or one of those?

[rubenski]

Thanks for your comments ASA. I'll just see what happens then. :)

@Celi: Jenstar recently commented on this situation here [webmasterworld.com]. It seems you have to seek approval from Google before you can do this.

[fezziwig]

Now onto the bigger, thornier question for ASA ... what can we do about all of those evil scraper sites that provide no original content but live to display AdSense ads and profit from the hard work of others?

Is there any way that content publishers can help eradicate the scrapers from the system?