Random images lined up with adsense ads

seen on a handful of sites

[smoger]

hey all.

ive noticed a handful of sites which post an adsense block with images above or below that line up perfectly with the ad links.

two questions here..

first, is this OK?

second, does it actually help? i can't see any other reason to do it except that they find it helps their CTR?

[fredw]

I've seen this recently too. The images of celebrities and similar aren't clickable, but they're sized so that one image corresponds to each ad in the ad unit, to its left.

This should be against TOS, the unclickable images are confusing and people are probably clicking on the ads to see content related to the unrelated images.

[coredump]

There were discussions about it numerous times on several forums. You can do it but do not try to make those images appear as part of the ad (keep visible border or some empty area between images and ads). And to be safe, right after you implement it let Adsense team know about it and ask them to review it.