Forum Moderators: martinibuster
A while back I actually emailed this generally inquiry to the Adsense help team, and was told, in a very general way, that I don't need to check with them, I can run Adsense on any website. Umm, I am disbelieving. I suspect my inquiry was not specific enough.
So, I still don't know the answer. Here are the things I suggest:
1. Ask the current owner. If you don't trust him/her, then put a clause in your agreement that you get a?% refund of the purchase price if it turns out that the site is banned from Adsense.
2. Use the wayback thingamagig to see if adsense ever ran on the site. If it did, and ads aren't on the site now, you have reason to believe its been banned.
3. Set up an adsense account for a separate legal entity (that is, not your current account), and buy ads on the site placing the adsense ads there. If ads don't run, you've got your answer. If they do, you also know how much to expect from the site. If I remember correctly, Adsense TOS require that you have editorial control over the site to run Adsense, but some ad agencies run Adsense as a default and they don't have editorial control over the site.
Let me know if you try any of these methods and if they work.
#2 is a possible, maybe the best option.
#3 sounds like a lot of work!
I doubt that the greyed out PR is a good check, but even if it was it doesn't help when registering an expired domain. Assuming a greyed out PR meant a site was excluded from Google, would a site that was excluded from a Google search automatically be banned from AdSense?