AdSense in Unsupported Languages

Can I put AdSense in a language not supported by AdSense?

[shafaki]

Is it against the TOS if I put AdSense on pages that are primarily in a language not supported by AdSense?

(Google's AdWords support Arabic, but Arabic is not one of the languages supported by AdSense. Sounds ironic, but it's true!)

[etechsupport]

I think that Adbrite is supporting Arabic language. You can check it as an alternate choice.

[HiCairo]

once I asked G about this.. they said i can do.. but they are not sure of the ads contents that will show on the site either will match the site or not.

[Sobriquet]

No - You cannot.

I had asked this about an year back.

Unsupported languages sites are one reason to be banned. They are against TOS.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

shafaki –

AdSense policies do not prohibit publishers from placing the AdSense ad code on pages in unsupported languages. However, if you do use AdSense on unsupported language pages, you may receive public service ads or ads in another language.

Therefore, if you are not satisfied with the AdSense ads that appear on your site, I recommend removing the AdSense ad code from these pages until we are able to support Arabic.

As you mentioned, AdWords has an inventory of Arabic language ads. However, the AdSense program uses technology to understand the meaning of text-based pages and serve content targeted ads accordingly. AdSense is not yet able to support the Arabic language in this way.

If you would like to see a list of languages that are currently supported by AdSense, please visit:

[google.com ]

I hope that clarifies things,

-ASA

[shafaki]

Thanks a million ASA. Yes, that completely dymistifies everything. Your words are great, clear and explain everything, plus a bit more.

I DO hope this day comes when Google invests in Arabic language technologies more and is able to 'understand' the content of pages written in Arabic.

My biggest dream is for Google to open up a branch here in Egypt, like it has done in India. (There are companies here in Egypt that have been working in Arabic machine translation technology, natural language processing in Arabic and similar stuff.)

Thanks again for your adivce ASA.

[hanan_cohen]

Dear ASA,

Following this question, but now for Hebrew.

I have a very popular website which is has a part in Hebrew and in English.

I have Google ads on the English site but when testing ads on the Hebrew site I get PSA's.

I know that there is an ad parameter called google_page_url that can tell AdSense to display ads related to another page.

If I have an English mirror page, can I use this parameter on the Hebrew page for displaying relevant English ads?

Thanks,

Hanan Cohen

[Dantol]

I DO hope this day comes when Google invests in Arabic language technologies more and is able to 'understand' the content of pages written in Arabic.

I hope so too. This would stimulate ebusiness economy in Egypt. I am 100% for it.

[hanan_cohen]

I am not sure Google doesn't understand Arabic.

I have seen Israeli sites that display Hebrew ads in them, although Google is not supposed to understand Hebrew. I think that since Arabic is a more widely used language than Hebrew, maybe it does understand Arabic but the feature is not implemented yet.

In this case, like many others, Arabic and Hebrew speakers have the same interest ;-)

[shafaki]

The word 'understand' is used in a loose way here. It actually refers to doing text analysis beyond viewing it as a mere strining together of text strings that are void of meaning and cannot be 'chewed' by Google, but just indexed and stored as is, as blocks of character strings.

Text analysis, on the other hand, involves much more than just storing chunks of characters in an index for search and retrieval purposes (even search alone benefits greatly from doing text analysis). Text analysis (which is what is refered to here by the word 'understanding') involves using NLP (natural language processing (not neuro-linguistic programming *wink*)) to uncover the concepts inside the text. This is done on more than one level:

First it starts with the morphological level (where "cat" is understood to be the singular form of "cats" and "played" is recognized as being the past tense of "play" ... etc).

Then on a higher levevel syntax is considered, where grammer rules are used to understand sentences from their structure (ex: Sentence = Subject + Verb. or: Sentence = Subject + Verb + Object ... etc).

The following level is of semantics. This involves the meaning of words. I think search engines only pass lightly on this stage as it is so resource demanding and might be practically impossible to use a full-fledged semantic analyzer on tera bytes of infor such as those chewed by Google's machines on a regular basis. Alternative lighter methods are used to group concepts together and to automatically classify related concepts with each other and determine the relationship between them.

So, Google is not yet doing such analysis on Arabic text, but is merely storing Arabic words in its index as chunks of characters without recognizing what their meaning is due to not doing any text analysis (even on the morphological level) on them.

The only commong thing between Arabic and Hebro is that they are written from right to left on contrast to Latin based languges (English, French, German, Italian, Spanich ...) which are written from left to right. Other than this visual outside issue, there is no similarity.

[HarryM]

I would be very interested to know when Google is likely to support Chinese in traditional characters. Currently Google supports simplified characters as used on the Chinese mainland or Singapore. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, etc. But there is no linguistic difference between the language, just the encoding which displays the character in its traditional or simplified version.

I really can't understand what the issue is here.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

shafaki, thanks for the positive feedback. It’s good to know we have publishers in Egypt who are excited about AdSense! Although we don’t yet have a date for any specific languages, we definitely plan to add more language in the future.

Hanan, while we understand that the content of your site translates directly on the mirrored Hebrew page, we kindly ask that you do not modify the AdSense code to change ad targeting as this is prohibited by our program policies.

The reason for this is that in order to benefit both AdSense and AdWords, we want to uphold the best interests of advertisers to ensure only users with genuine interest click on their ads. Modifying the ad code to display English language ads on an unsupported language site can negatively impact ad relevancy to your users.

If you are not satisfied with the ads received on an unsupported language site, we therefore recommend removing the AdSense code until we are able to support your language.

-ASA

[HarryM]

AdSenseAdvisor,

Somewhat off topic, but I am puzzled by the preview tool. I am in the UK, and I sometimes see ads from China and Hong Kong on my pages in Simplified Chinese pages. But there is no Geo-targetting option for China or Hong Kong on the preview tool, so I cannot be sure what people are actually seeing in these locations. The only specific Chinese language region on the preview tool is Singapore. Is this likely to change?