No images lined up with adsense ads

a rare policy clarification from Google

[Rodney]

From the Adsense Blog:

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads

blog [adsense.blogspot.com] post goes on to give visual examples of "prohibited" image placement.

I've been seeing this a lot lately as I've been browsing the web. I wonder if they'll start sending out warnings?

[Sweet Cognac]

I found something pretty funny yesterday. Someone had a large rectangle with the images lined up on the left and adsense was showing exactly 1 ad in the rectangle. It sure looked wierd.

[Sense_able]

One thing about the change in policy that worries me is that you only find out about it via the blog or on these forums. I do not drop by these pages very often and seldom have time to read the adsense blog. ( I have enough to do) I dread to think if I had been placing images and not known about this policy change.

Why doesn't the adsense team take pity on the overworked webmaster and send out a monthly or fortnightly newsletter. Give us the information, don't have us hunting for it. I know that some wise guy will come along and make out it is my priority to read everything that is posted on these pages and the blogs and the policy pages and God knows where else.

But what if we were not to know about these pages!

[europeforvisitors]

One thing about the change in policy that worries me is that you only find out about it via the blog or on these forums.

It isn't a change in policy; it's a warning or reminder. Anyone who's read the program policies and the terms & conditions should know better than to trick readers with shady design techniques. And if some publishers lack common sense or honesty, or if they're too lazy to read the program policies and T&C, how is dumping them from the network a bad thing? On the contrary: It's good for advertisers, for Google, and for publishers who want AdSense to be around a while.

[gregbo]

I do not drop by these pages very often and seldom have time to read the adsense blog. (I have enough to do)

The AdSense blog has an RSS feed and a mailing list.

[HowYesNo]

i often see here "somebody is hurting advertisers by placing images next to ads". but i must ask - what advertisers. the people started placing images next to ads because they are getting 1c or 2c per click from the MFA sites. that's the main problem! before 2 years i never tried to put images next to ads because the advetisers were quality sites with quality content and clicks are good... but suddenly mfa sites appeared on our ads and earnings per click dropped 50%. and this is the time when all started. many webmasters tried to earn the same amound of money they did before by placing images next to ads. ok google is now baning people for doing this, but why dont they instead BAN all mfa sites as they said before, because i dont see they are taking measurement about no-content mfa sites, and of course mfa webmasters are seeing this as a big opportunity and then they open 10x more mfa sites every day

that's my 2c

sorry for bad english ;)

[edited by: encyclo at 1:53 am (utc) on Dec. 29, 2006]
[edit reason] language [/edit]

[DamonHD]

Hi,

You are trying to justify your unethical behaviour by the purported actions of MFAs? Probably I read that wrong.

Perhaps you are only getting 1c clicks because that's all your clicks are worth, given your content, possible unintended/worthless clickthroughs from your site, and the calculations done by SmartPricing?

BTW, not all 1c clicks come from MFAs either. I have a pro-bono not-for-profit site that does not sell anything (and that existed before AdSense), so I have to keep traffic costs as low as possible. My bids are anything from ~2c up to ~50c depending on the quality of the traffic. I'll take less-good traffic that includes deceptive/crap sites if it is cheap enough to keep my cost-of-conversion OK. Sometimes 1c is not low enough and I end up blocking another garbage site...

Rgds

Damon

[edited by: DamonHD at 9:34 pm (utc) on Dec. 28, 2006]

[HowYesNo]

ok i understand this if you're advertising good site, selling anything ... and you see that conversation from some sites arent good, and ofcourse you'll give 1c to those sites, but what every mfa site is doing is shame, they always give 1c / 2c per click and i don't understand why google accept these sites at all, do they check these sites or they dont care, because mfa sites are ruining google concept, they write rules for publishers like don't put images, dont bla bla... but do they manualy check mfa sites who grows everyday with billion broken rules on it, why they dont block these sites and not us small publishers

big G is loosing control in both sectors i think, and maybe it's time to move to other aff program

[Lagamorph]

and maybe it's time to move to other aff program

That makes more sense than whining about being a victim. If you think Google is abusing you don't do business with them.

By the way I don't get mfa's on my site and my cpc has been going up in the last few months. I think G is fixing the problem ;)

[VedranKovac]

I've seen image aligned ads for the first time on the a site - just about a week after it was featured as a 'success example' on the google's page.

I mean, come on guys, please dont tell me that google did not know or benefit from such techniques.

the site later removed the images and changed the layout, but nevertheless he had it in production for at least a year.

I've used it on a number of pages with a varying levels of success, and after i removed all images I've observed only an infinitesimal impact on the revenue.

Cheers

Vedran

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:13 am (utc) on Jan. 7, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]