AdSense Warning
Tue, 4 September, 2007 – 8:59 pm
We had this through from Google last weeknn
Hello,nnWhile reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a way that does not comply with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as *****.nn?Publishers may not implement Google ads in a manner that disguises the ads in any way, for instance, by formatting neighboring content to look similar to the ads, or by making ads look like games or forum threads. Additionally, publishers may not attempt to associate specific images with the individual ads appearing on their sites. Such an implementation may confuse users who assume that the image is directly related to the advertiser's offerings.nnPlease make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3 business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our programme policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all your other pages comply with these policies.nnOnce you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.nnThank you for your cooperation.
nnThis is about our busiest site which runs contextual ads and a link unit in the sidebar. Not fully knowing which ads they were exactly referring to, and knowing that all of them blended in, I simply added a faint grey border around all the contextual ads on the site and gave the link unit a background on the 'Ads by Google' header. We emailed Google back and they responded and seemed happy with the changes.nnIt's a bit of a grey area about how much you can blend your ads in to the site now. I know you can't display images too close to the adverts, or make it seem like the image is part of the ad. Our ads were of the same link colour and text colour as the site, on the same background and without a border. Without the 'Ads by Google' by the ads I guess you'd never know that they weren't part of the site. At least with Google's curved corners options the borders don't look so strict and boring.nnSo how has our income been? Well this happened last Wednesday and for the rest of the week our click through ratio dropped from around 16% to 13%. Not exceptionally bad, and the earnings themselves didn't seem overly affected. However the past 3 days have not been good. We're now down to 11% CTR and earnings are almost halved. Hopefully it may just be a lull. I've written in the past about earnings seeming to be lower at the start of the month (but never got any real proof) and we do sometimes have the occasional dip. So it's too early to say but I'll revisit this at the end of the month and see how much the earnings have been affected if at all.nnStill, at least they emailed us and didn't just ban the account 
4 Responses to “AdSense Warning”
what a pita. A few months back we were sent an email saying they had detected invalid clicks on ONE of our sites. When we have 20 sites running I immediately replied and asked if they could tell us which one so I could check IPs etc and do what I could to make sure it didn't happen again. They replied saying they couldn't give us anymore info and basically that we had to repay them in our future earnings. So we did. but it's just hard when you don't know why or what or how to proceed!
By sara on Sep 4, 2007
Luckily neither of us have ever had that dreaded email however our ex-housemate did. He had his account suspended for a week, he emailed Google on a daily basis offering his server logs, access to his site stats, details on his IP and computer details etc. After a week they just reactivated his account and he'd only lost the earnings he would have made had his account been running.nnAlso, of course, anyone can copy your AdSense code and place it on any site, so it's now a good idea to add the allowed sites to use AdSense into your account (it's a new option), just to give you that little extra protection.
By Sarah on Sep 4, 2007
yes they aren't very nice when things go wrong. i had the same problem a couple of years ago and they weren't very helpful.nni got into the debate about blending in recently on a forum and many seemed so sue they could blend their ads in but as you say Sarah it is such a Grey area it needs to be highlighted to everyone to be careful. if Google decide to be awkward then they can and there isn't much we can do about it.
By Slee on Sep 4, 2007
Google used to say to blend your ads in, make them look like part of the site. Clearly they've realised that was not a good idea now. But, as you say, they can be awkward if they want, it's their system and business. It's a shame they don't make things a little more black and white though.nnHowever, despite all that, AdSense does continue to be the best earner for us. Not intentionally mind. At least we don't rely on our AIS earnings to live. Just to pay for our holiday instead!
By Sarah on Sep 5, 2007