Forum Moderators: martinibuster
They have added code to manipulate AdSense ads to have HUGE titles... and they really, really appear to be main links on the site... like headlines.
Here is the gist of the code... (with brackets removed to be non-functional here):
For an image ad, display the image; there will be only one .
if google_ads[0].type == 'image' {
sA += 'tr td align="center"' +
'a href="' + google_ads[0].url + '"style="text-decoration: none"' +
'img src="' + google_ads[0].image_url +
'" border="0" /a /td /tr ';
}
// Finish up anything that needs finishing up
// Print "Ads By Google" -- include link to Google feedback page if available
sA += '/table';
// Print "Ads By Google" -- include link to Google feedback page if available
sB += 'tr td align="left"' +
'div style="text-align:left;font-size:10px"';
if (google_info.feedback_url) {
sB += 'a href="' + google_info.feedback_url + '" font style="font-size:11px" face="Arial" color="#000000" Ads by Google /font /a';
} else {
sB += 'Ads by Google';
}
sB += '/div font style="font-size:10px" br /div /td /tr';
sB += '/table';
document.write(sA);
return;
}
script
script language="JavaScript"
google_ad_client = "#*$!#*$!x";
google_ad_channel ="#*$!#*$!x";
google_hints = "a, few, dozen, keyword, phrases, here";
google_max_num_ads = 3;
google_feedback = "on";
google_ad_output = "js";
google_ad_type = "text";
google_image_size = "336x280";
google_encoding = "utf8";
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My question is -- how the heck is he/she getting away with this?!
Has anyone else seen this type of code?
It was very effective -- I nearly clicked on the top ad because the headline was so relevant... looked like the main link to the content you'd seek if you at the site for that purpose.
I'd just like to hear if anyone else has seen this! You can sticky me privately and I'll let you know the URL, if you want to see what I mean.
YM
Someone explain to me why Google would want to allow users to be tricked into clicking on Premium sites, but not on just any site?
I'm just amazed at the double standard and I'd love to be enlightened on the reasoning for it. If I were an advertiser (and I *am* also an AdWords user), I would be upset to find what I found.
Maybe you have to see how it was utilized on this particular page -- do feel free to sticky me if you want the actual page URL.
YM
It's called greed. (in corporate speak it would be called maximizing earnings) They aren't real particular abut the non-premium sites either.
Someone will be along shortly to defend their (greed), err position.
They have added code to manipulate AdSense ads to have HUGE titles... and they really, really appear to be main links on the site... like headlines.
Sounds similar to (the same as?) site-targeted CPM ads, which have one ad per unit with big headline type.
Whether the format is deceptive depends on how well the headlines are blended, I'd guess (e.g., whether they're the same typeface as the site's typeface, whether there's a border or other visual separator, and what colors are being used).
