Webinar: AdSense program policies

Do you have a question about AdSense policies? Have you ever received a policy notification from AdSense? Do you sometimes worry about your account security? We’d like to invite you to an upcoming free AdSense policy webinar that’s designed to help publishers stay compliant with Google AdSense program policies. We’ll discuss selected policies, explain how Google enforces them and share tips on how to stay compliant, as well as what to do if you receive a policy notification.


Topics covered include:

• the types of pages on which AdSense ads may not be placed
• how to ensure that your site remains compliant with our policies
• what actions are taken in case of violation, and which notifications are sent by Google
• what to do if you receive a policy notification from Google

The details:

Title: Google AdSense program policies webinar
Date: Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Time: 5pm London time (GMT+01:00), 9am Pacific Time

All publishers are welcome to attend the webinar, but please note the UK friendly start time of the session.

If you'd like to attend, please register here:

	Register for the webinar

We'll also have a Q&A session during this webinar. You can submit your questions in advance to the AdSense team and vote on questions submitted by other webinar attendees here. The most popular questions will be answered live during our webinar! To join and participate in the webinar you’ll need to install Webex Meeting Manager.

Posted by Kasia Kugaudo - Inside AdSense Team

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New publisher application process

We’re continually evaluating our AdSense application process in order to ensure the safest possible network for our advertisers, as well as the best possible experience for you, our publishers. With that in mind, we’ve now implemented a change to our initial review process that will result in a stronger AdSense network. Improving the quality of the network will drive more interest and demand from advertisers, increasing the earning potential for all of our publishers.



Starting today, we’ll begin adding a new step to the review process and sending notifications at two key points. After a new application is submitted, we’ll begin with preliminary checks on the site and the applicant’s submitted details. If the application passes through this first stage, we’ll notify the applicant by email, grant them account access, and provide them with ad code to place on their submitted site. It’s essential at this stage for the applicant to place the ad code on their site, as the review process can’t be completed until the ad code is implemented.



However, live ads won’t immediately appear once the ad code has been placed on the submitted site. Since the application hasn’t been fully approved yet, temporary “blank ads” will be shown instead. These blank ads will blend in with the background of the page, so users won’t see them and the user experience won’t be impacted. As a result, there’s nothing to click on and thus revenue can’t yet be generated. If the applicant logs into their AdSense account at this stage of the review process, they’ll see a reminder that their account is still under review.



Soon after the ad code has been added to the submitted site, a final approval decision will be made and the applicant will be notified by email. Newly approved publishers will see live ads automatically appear in the existing ad units on their pages. These publishers are then welcome (and encouraged!) to add more ad units to their submitted site and to any other policy-compliant sites they own. We also encourage new publishers to ensure their sites are available to be crawled by the AdSense robot (Mediapartners-Google), and also to use our best-performing ad formats.



If you’d like more information about this new approval process, please visit our Help Center or feel free to post questions about this topic in our Help Forum.



Thanks for being a valuable member of AdSense as we continue to improve the quality of our network.



Posted by Max Cohen, Product Manager

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Policy Tips - Keeping the network family-safe

If you’re an avid blog reader, you probably remember blog series like AdSense Facts & Fiction and Newbie Fridays. After much demand, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be delivering more frequent policy posts. Every month, we’ll be taking a closer look at our policies to provide clarifications, best practices, and tips.

This week, we’d like to revisit one of our longest standing and most asked about policies: adult content. As every AdSense publisher should know, ads may only be placed on family-safe content. Because the label “family-safe” is a general term that differs among all countries and cultures, we often receive questions asking for clarification on what we consider adult content.

Prohibiting sexually explicit pornographic images is straightforward, but publishers often unknowingly overlook some of the more subtle content that can be intended for a mature audience. Examples can include adult toys or fetish sites, sheer/see-through clothing, and lewd or provocative poses (even if clothed) that have sexually gratifying overtones. This rule applies to links or ads that drive traffic to adult or mature content too.

Something else to keep in mind is that images are not the only elements that are considered adult. Text that is sexual in nature is considered adult content as well. Some examples include articles with sexual health tips (including medical-related advice), erotic stories, and comment spam with adult keywords (most commonly found on sites with user-generated-content).

When in doubt about whether an image or text might be construed as adult content, our rule of thumb is this: if you wouldn’t want a child to see the content or if you would be embarrassed to view the page in front of colleagues, then it’s probably not family-safe and you shouldn’t place AdSense ad code on it. We appreciate your help in making the network a balanced ecosystem where users, publishers, and advertisers can grow and thrive together.

Cecelia Choi, AdSense Policy team

Did you find this policy blog post helpful? You can share your feedback or tell us about a specific policy topic you'd like to learn more about here.

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Clarifying our ad implementation policies

We’ve recently made some changes to the language of our program policies. We highly encourage publishers who have signed the AdSense online Terms and Conditions to check the AdSense program policies often, and we'd like to take a moment to clarify our ad implementation policies and mention a few updates that have been made.

Publishers are encouraged to experiment with a variety of placements and ad formats to enhance the user experience and thereby maximize their earnings. However, altering the behavior, targeting, or appearance of AdSense ads without explicit approval from Google is generally prohibited. This behavior includes but is not limited to placing ad code in iframes in such a way that manipulates the standard behavior, targeting or delivery of ads. An iframe is an HTML tag used in web design that allows a webpage, picture, or graphic to be displayed in a frame within another page. Our policies have always disallowed the misuse of iframes, and recently we clarified our language to explicitly prohibit the misuse of iframes in our program policies.

Improperly iframed ads are a disservice to our advertisers since the ad itself can be obscured. Not only are they not viewable, these implementations can lead to accidental clicks if these hidden ads are placed in a location that users frequently click. Please see below for an example of a partially hidden banner.

Hidden iframed ads is one form of misuse. The other is cross-domain iframing abuse. Cross-domain iframes are used to frame content from a different site. This type of implementation can allow other sites to frame ads that belong to another site without the publisher’s knowledge.

As a result, we’ve modified our Ad Behavior policy to the following:
AdSense code may not be altered, nor may the standard behavior, targeting or delivery of ads be manipulated in any way that is not explicitly permitted by Google. This includes but is not limited to the following: clicking Google ads may not result in a new browser window being launched, nor may Google ads be placed in an IFRAME.

We’re aware of certain ad implementations that require the valid use of iframes. As per our program policies, exceptions to our policies are permitted only with authorization from Google.

With our updated language, our goal is to be more proactive about enforcing the misuse of iframes. Iframing is not only deceptive when improperly implemented, but it often leads to unintended behavioral outcomes that result in policy violations, such as the double-serving of ads. As our program policies also note, we reserve the right to disable ad serving to sites and/or accounts that fail to comply with these policies without permission from Google. To best adhere to our policies and experience better targeting results, we recommend pasting our ad code directly into the source of your web page HTML.

We hope you found this clarification to our program policies useful. If you have any questions regarding iframe policies or program policies in general, feel free to contact us. To help ensure the good standing of your account, we encourage you to check your content and implementations on a regular basis. You can also stay informed about policy updates by revisiting our Help Center, our Help Forum, and subscribing to this blog for updated posts, tips, and upcoming AdSense events. If you find sites within our network that are clearly violating these guidelines, we encourage you to report them to us.

Posted by Cecelia Choi - AdSense Policy team

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Key policy takeaways from AdSense in Your City

If you follow our AdSense blog you may have heard about our AdSense in Your City events. We love the opportunity to meet publishers in person, hear first-hand feedback and gauge reactions to new AdSense features. At one of the most recent events in our Zurich office, we offered workshops on the Google AdSense program policies where we gained a deeper understanding of your concerns and questions around our policies and policy enforcement processes. To help spread the message to those unable to attend, we wanted to share a few things from the workshops on the Inside AdSense blog:

• We enforce our program policies on a site and account level. It’s definitely worth reading this ‘AdSense Facts & Fiction: Program Policies’ post to learn more about our policy enforcement processes.
• We have a lot of information in our help center regarding some of the notifications we send publishers. These help center entries also contain links to forms, which you can use to get in touch with us:
  
  • Received a notification asking you to make changes within three business days: Here is a detailed overview on what you need to do and know. Please keep in mind that you don’t need to let us know if you have simply fixed the violation.
  • Ad-serving has been disabled to your site: Read our Help Center article for more information on why this may have happened.
  • Received a notification stating your AdSense account may be disabled: By reading this information you may be able to get your AdSense account back in good standing.
  • Your AdSense account has been disabled: AdSense accounts can be disabled for different reasons. If you’d like to appeal the decision, be sure to use the right appeal form.
  • You’d like to report a policy violation: Our team is happy to investigate any policy violations submitted through these forms.
• We send email notifications whenever we need to enforce our program policies, so make sure to check the email address associated with your AdSense account regularly. Alternatively, you can also view all policy notifications by visiting the Messages page, under the Home tab when you sign in to your AdSense account.
• Some publishers have been contacted because AdSense ads had been placed next to comment spam entries on their blogs and forums. While we understand that no publisher intentionally allows their blogs and forums to be spammed, we ask that you ensure no ads are placed on these pages - as you can imagine advertisers don’t want their ads shown in this context. Check out the Webmaster Central blogpost and this help center article to learn how to combat comment spam effectively.
• Make sure you use the right AdSense product! We have a range of AdSense products these days, from the traditional AdSense for content to AdSense for feeds. This might seem obvious, but in the past, for example, we’ve seen publishers use AdSense for content ad code within mobile applications. If you’d like to understand why this is important, please read this blog post. Here is a complete overview of all of our current AdSense products.

We’d like to thank all of your for your great feedback and questions, and look forward to meeting many more of you. Make sure that you’re opted in to ‘Special Offers’ in your email preferences under the ‘My Account’ tab within your AdSense account so we can let you know about future events in your area!

Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Policy team

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The do's and dont's to increase cost per click

In previous blog posts we’ve explained what RPM is and how it's influenced by what users do when they come to your site. We want to take this conversation a step further today, and discuss some strategies that can potentially increase the cost per click (CPC) of your ad units.

Though we can’t quantify a good or bad CPC, there are several things you can do (and a few that you shouldn’t do) if you’re trying to increase the CPC of the ads on your site. Take a look at some of the best practices outlined below:

DOs:

• Enable all of your ad units to show both text and image/rich media ads. By increasing the number of advertisers competing for your ad units, the ad auction will make sure that the highest paying ad will be shown. Learn more from one of our publishers who made this change, and edit all your units in bulk with the new AdSense interface.
• Keep your filter list small so you don’t lower your revenue potential by blocking the highest-paying ads. Watch this video to better understand the ad auction and how to enable the most competition for your ad space.
• Increase the number of ads competing for your site by setting up your custom channels for placement targeting. Read this post for more details and instructions on how to set these up.
• The top-paying ads will be shown in the ad unit that appears first in your HTML code. To take advantage of this, you will need to understand which of your ad units has the highest clickthrough rate (CTR) by using custom channels. Then, you can easily change the code of your website to make sure that your top performing unit is the one with the highest-bidding ads.

DON’Ts:

• Some publishers believe that by writing about high paying keywords they will be able to improve the earnings on their site. This is not a practice that we encourage. In fact, we always recommend to write about subjects that you know well and that you are passionate about so you can continue to create the compelling, original content that attracts visitors to your site.
• Don't use scraped content. It’s a violation of our policies.
• Don’t create multiple accounts. Publishers are not permitted to maintain multiple AdSense accounts under the same payee name, and having the ad code of different accounts on the same website will not affect your CPC in any way.
• Finally, don’t try to manipulate the standard behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads in any way that is not explicitly permitted by Google. In case you have any doubt, read the AdSense program policies.

We hope this helps you optimize your AdSense implementation and maximize your CPC. Leave us a comment with the results!

Posted by Marco Viappiani - Inside AdSense team

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AdSense Facts & Fictions Part VI: User-Generated Content

Fiction: I shouldn’t be held responsible if users post content on my site or network that violates AdSense policies.

Fact: You are responsible for ensuring that all of your content, including user-generated content such as forum posts, blog comments or outside feeds, is in compliance with AdSense policies on any page or site for which you’ve enabled AdSense ads.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts in this series, we regularly review the content in the AdSense network to ensure that it's safe for advertisers, users, and publishers, as network quality is of premium importance. Just as you, our publishers, expect us to do all we can to remove undesirable ads, our advertisers expect high standards to be maintained; for example, a company using AdWords to market baby clothes doesn’t want their ads to appear next to violent or mature content. In order to be transparent about what kinds of content violate our policies, we’ve published a complete list in our Help Center.

Making sure content complies with our policies can be complex when factoring in user-generated content. Keeping tabs on the hundreds (or even thousands!) of videos, blog posts, photos, tweets, and comments that can come in every day is a massive undertaking. However, you are ultimately responsible for all sites on which you have placed your ad code, regardless of whether you own or have produced the content. This blog post provides a few suggestions to help you prevent and monitor potential content violations.

In most cases, our first step after a policy violation is found is to issue a policy notification for the site. Exceptions include DMCA and egregious policy violations, more details here. After the initial notification, you need to take action, not simply respond to the warning, but implement solutions to proactively ensure that violating content is removed and new content added to the network or site complies with our policies.

We understand that it can take time to find the best solution to prevent problematic content from appearing on your site and we want to work with you to give you the time needed to find a fix. If it becomes evident that a publisher is unable to do so, or if the violation is continuing or egregious, then we will disable an account. We offer an appeals process, but the bottom line is, we can’t partner with publishers that pose a risk to our advertisers (just as we won’t partner with advertisers that could compromise you).

We know how hard you work to make sure that your sites are of the highest quality and free of adult content, unoriginal content, or anything else that may violate policies and we thank you for your efforts. When advertisers, publishers, and users know they can trust the integrity of our advertising environment, everyone wins.

Posted by Hannah Schlesinger - AdSense Policy team

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post implied that an AdSense publisher has to proactively screen all content on his or her site. While publishers are required to take steps to keep the pages on which ads appear free from content that violates our policies, there are various methods that publishers can take to do this (see here for tips).

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AdSense Facts & Fiction Part V: Unoriginal content

Fiction: Publishers can put ads on auto-generated pages or other copied content that was not created by them.

Fact: We don’t allow sites with auto-generated or otherwise unoriginal content to participate in the AdSense program. This is to ensure that our users are benefiting from a unique online experience and that our advertisers are partnering with useful and relevant sites.

In the past, we’ve talked about tips for maintaining an AdSense-friendly site with user-generated content (UGC). Today's topic is not only applicable to UGC sites, but also to all websites affiliated with AdSense for content.

Sometimes we come across sites that are using software to generate automated content. These sites might look like normal news sites, but the information is completely plagiarized. Scraping content and passing it off as one’s own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies. AdSense depends on maintaining a balance between user, publisher, and advertiser experience. We strive to protect that ecosystem as much as possible by encouraging and protecting unique and relevant content.

Obviously publishers and Google are concerned with revenue generation, and when original traffic encounters quality content, it’s a match made in heaven. The best way to engage users in the long term is to engage users. Provide your opinion on the news, offer a different service, organize your site in a way so that a user is captivated and moved.

Take some time to familiarize yourself with these webmaster quality guidelines, and if you find sites within our network that are clearly violating these guidelines, feel free to report it to us.

One last thing: a quick, but well-deserved thank you to the majority of you that continue to inspire us with your great, unique, and creative content. Keep up the awesome work!

Posted by Cecelia Choi - AdSense Policy team

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AdSense Policy webinars are coming to Asia and Australia

Have you ever received a policy notification from AdSense? Do you sometimes worry about your account security? Are there any particular policies you still don't quite understand and want to know more about?

In order to help you better understand our policies, the AdSense team will be holding a series of online seminars in Asia and Australia, covering mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Austraia, New Zealand, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia on the schedule below. During the seminar, Google AdSense policy specialists will explain the details of AdSense policies, debunk popular myths, share inside tricks and tips, as well as answer any questions. The agenda will cover the following materials:

• Website content and ads implementation guidelines
• Account violation and account safety
• What do I do if I get a policy notice?
• Live Q&A

Publishers located in the regions below should have already received our invitations. If you live in a different region, you’re still more than welcome to join! Just check the schedule below and sign up for the time and language that are most suitable for you.

Region	Regional Date/Time	PST Date/Time	Language	Registration
China	2:00-3:00PM Beijing Time Dec 15, 2010	10:00-11:00PM PST Dec 14, 2010	Chinese	Register
Hong Kong	2:00-3:00PM Beijing Time Dec 9, 2010	10:00-11:00PM PST Dec 8, 2010	English	Register
Taiwan	2:00-3:00PM Beijing Time Dec 8, 2010	10:00-11:00PM PST Dec 7, 2010	Chinese	Register
Australia/ New Zealand	3:00-4:00PM Sydney Time Dec 8, 2010	8:00-9:00PM PST Dec 7, 2010	English	Register
India	11:00AM-12:00PM Mumbai time Dec 7, 2010	9:30-10:30PM PST Dec 6, 2010	English	Register
SEA (Thai)	12:00-1:00PM Singapore time Dec 14, 2010	8:00-9:00PM PST Dec 13, 2010	Thai	Register
SEA(English)	3:00-4:00PM Singapore time Dec 14, 2010	11:00PM-12:00 PST Dec 13-14, 2010	English	Register
Japan	5:00-6:00PM Tokyo Time Nov 25, 2010	12:00-1:00AM PST Nov 25, 2010	Japanese	Completed

Posted by Peggy Chen - AdSense Policy team

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Avoiding accidental clicks Pt. 2: Use the right product

We hope you found our last post on invalid clicks useful. Today we wanted to give you more advice on this topic and talk about ads on pages containing interactive media, such as videos and games.

We understand that video content pages aren't as easy to monetize as regular text-based pages and that publishers are interested in experimenting with different ad placements, but we’d like to clarify some of our policies addressing AdSense for content ads in interactive media environments:

• We don’t allow publishers to overlay AdSense for content ads on video content.
• We don’t allow publishers to implement AdSense for content ads as in-stream video placements.
• We don’t allow publishers to implement AdSense for content ads on interstitial pages. So if a user has decided to watch a video, you may not implement ads on pages saying “your video will start in 15 seconds." We’ve also seen this placement on Flash gaming sites in the form of an ad being shown to the user while the game is loading in the background. However, even if you allow users to skip these ads or close them, this placement is not allowed.

Now for the good news: If you are interested in monetizing overlay or in-stream placements on your video content, please check out AdSense for video. Similarly, if you are interested in placing ads on interstitial pages on your Flash gaming sites, read about AdSense for games. The key difference between using these products and AdSense for content is that with AdSense for games and AdSense for video, we only show ads from a pool of advertisers who specifically target these kinds of placements and have optimized their campaigns and creatives towards them.

Think about your users and advertisers when implementing AdSense ads on your sites. Make sure that ads are separated enough from the content to prevent accidental clicks, and that ads are always recognizable as such. Remember that AdSense is an ecosystem that will continue to thrive as long as all parties remain happy within it. Users are happy to see relevant and useful ads that are not obtrusive or misleading, advertisers are happy to reach their target audience and get good returns on their investment, and you - the publisher - will be happy to have an AdSense account in good standing.

Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Policy team

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