Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Taking this from the forum and off into the real world, what are people seeing? There have been a few reports in the forum from people on the receiving end of the quality specialist checks the past couple of months (such as the publisher running AdSense on pages with"not enough content" [webmasterworld.com] was warned to remove the AdSense code from the page).
There have been other members complaining that they have been banned for issues having to due with non-compliancy since the end of September (as opposed to being suspended for fraudulent clicks). Some suspension issues include:
I have been hearing fewer complaints about those obvious spam AdSense sites that seemed to be everywhere in the Fall. And I have been hearing fewer grumblings from advertisers who have seen their content targeted ads appearing on the Terms/Policies/FAQ violating sites.
But what are people seeing as they are out and about the web surfing in the past month or so? What kind of violations are you seeing (ie. running competing content-targeted ads on the same page as AdSense, double serving, keyword spamming, nonexistant content, "site not allowed to have" content). Just comment on regular publishers, since premium publishers do have different rules to follow.
Do you think the AdSense quality specialists are making a difference to clean up sites running AdSense to keep the advertisers happy? Or are you still seeing the same problems you saw months ago?
As always, no URLs please :)
[google.com...]
Other than that I've seen fewer 'problem' sites than a couple of months ago.
loanuniverse, I have also seen some strange keyword stuffing too, although none that I have noticed in the past month.
The biggest current violation I am seeing is AdSense running on the same page as AdSense competitors. ie. AdSense on the left and a competitor on the right, or AdSense on the top and a competitor on the bottom. This is definitely an AdSense violation, and those who have asked the AdSense Team about running these competitors on the same page were also told it was not allowed. But I see it quite frequently.
I never see violations...what kind of scummy sites y'all visiting, anyway? ;)
I mostly agree with this. Maybe because I don't really browse that much and just go directly to a few sites.
Bored at work... type www.webmasterworld.com/forum89 in the start->run window and come here directly.
If anything, I would say that the most prevalent would be running adsense and the adsense cpm provided by other ad networks at the same time, and that is probably due to an oversight of the webmaster of not disabling the google campaign.
I don't know about the running of adsense in searchs being against the TOS, the last thread about this showed that it was now being allowed while still technically forbidden. Also as I understand it, the main objection was not being able to serve a targeted ad so there is no real big crime here.
And they don't even check their case studies publishers [webmasterworld.com] ...
I doubt they have quality specialists checking any publisher sites at all
I do know people who have received hand checks on their site by someone on the AdSense team checking for compliance. So they are doing it, but how widespread is the question. Unless you are the ones doing the checking, it is hard to know.
i have seen three sites cheating and have reported every one of them.
Have you seen the sites clean up their acts after being reported? Filing a regular Google serp spam report will only help future algos, but I wonder if an AdSense spam report ends up in NeverNeverLand or if it is actually used for finding violating sites.
Again some people would argue, "Let Google run its own affairs and you run yours." The problem with this argument is that with the size of checks that Google cuts, Google Adsense IS my business. I have an active interest in keeping this system healthy, which means keeping it free of spam/TOS violators if I think they will hurt the long term prospects.
I guess what some people see as a bunch of finks, others see as a self-regulating group of publishers.
I have had NO hesitation pointing out the cheaters to G and will continue to do so. This is in many senses MY program too and I will do everything to preserve it healthy.
I certainly hope that this doesn't get me cut off in some near future.
BZ
It seems to me that these tiny infractions are more common these days than the kind of major violations that were obviously out just to scam the AdSense system.
I've seen AdSense delivered selectively via Javascript, so I know it can be done (sorry I can't provide any code snippets offhand). You could also use PHP or the kind of Perl script that is use for ad serving, etc.
Since my site is a template, the template itself has what I consider enough content (top, side, bottom, navigation, headlines, etc) that I don't think I am pushing the limits of the TOS by having a page with links (surrounded by content).
I will revisit it though. It might be interesting to try and re-write my adserving software to not server certain ads on certain pages (urls).
BZ