18 Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS

1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links. Update: Google has allowed you to run contextual advertising like Yahoo ads, Chitika etc provided the ads do not resemble Adsense ads.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches - Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing - Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported - Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

Update:
16. Maximum 2 referral button per product per page - With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only 2 referral buttons for adsense referral, adwords referral, Google pack and Firefox with google toolbar referral.

17. Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads. - Several services like Chitika eminimalls allow you to place alternate urls, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating an simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate url feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate urls.

18. Do not confuse with adjacent images - It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. More.

Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful!

Source -> QuickOnlineTips

How to Remove Public Service Ads (PSA) in Google Adsense

Why Public Service Ads are bad?

• Most important fact is that there are no payments for clicks on PSA’s. So even if you have a good CTR (click thorugh ratio), it is of no use.
• It spoils the look of your site. Lets say you decided to place a big 160×600 vertical banner on your site and no ad showed, the PSA ads will have big monocolour fonts since one big ad wil be shown instead of 5 ads there, which looks bad to the surfer.

How to remove Public Service Ads?

• Develop sufficient good content with keywords on your webpage related to the topic of interest. Google is a great fan of good content websites.
• Ensure that META tags like ‘title’ & ‘description’ and the headings tags like h1, h2 etc. have content which matches the rest of your site. They are main ways google judges your pages content.
• Add specific keywords in your text which will help the google bot to determine and understand the content of your website. Repeat related keywords which will better help to understand site content. Do not fill your page with simlar keywords, it might work against your favour.
• Try to keep the entire website focussed on a particular theme, so that even if the content on a particular page is lesser, the ads wil show.
• Do not place multiple ad units if there are not suffcient ads to display on all of them. Also Google TOS do not allow placing more than 3 ad units on a page.
• Use section targeting - you can target an ad unit to a specific section of your blog, as well as block out irrelevant sections like navigational links. Useful to get more targeted ads.

Is your site Still showing Public Service Ads?

• Google may take time to crawl your site. Although most of the times the ads show immediately, at times it takes upto 48-72 hours for google to assess the content of newly created webpage. This usually occurs if your site has not been indexed before by Google. The time is reduced on newer pages of a site already running adsense. Google claims the ads will get better and more focussed to your pages with time.
• Your page may contain objectionable content. This may be against Google Adsense policies. If you feel your page has no such content, then look for any objectionable keywords or phrases which may be present accidentaly. Removing such content can cause PSA’s to dissapear.
• Your site maybe using a robots.txt file, which will may not be properly set up and prevent the AdSense crawler from crawling your web pages. Add the following two lines to the top of your robots.txt file:User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow:
• Frames may occasionaly cause difficult in indexing your page. Always remember to tick the Framed page checkbox from the Ad layout code page when generating your ad code. Similarly IFRAME’s also prevent effective indexing and cause PSA’s
• There may not be any ads configured to show in your region. Lets say that these ads may be working in United States, but maybe showing PSA is Zambia. This is because Google Adwords payers can select regions where to display their ads, where they believe their target surfers are. After all why should an eye surgeon in US want to promote his service in Zambia? Try using the Google Adsense Preview Tool (works on IE only) which helps to determine probable ads in different regions.
• Recheck your Adsense code was inserted properly on your webpage. Do no attempt to modify the code in any way, as it is against their terms of service. Adsense gives enough options to cutomisethe ad colours and sizes to suit your site. USe only the official code available from their site.
• Remove session ID’s from urls - they changes every time a different user views a page, and the URL will not be in the indexed everytime.
• Reduce your filter blocked urls. This feature is in place to allow you to block competitors ads from showing on your pages. If you block too many such urls, there may not be any advertisers left to display ads.
• Use the Google Adsense Sandbox tool Simply enter the URL or keywords in the box below, and you will see up to 20 sample AdSense ads for the URL or keywords.

Official ways to hide Public Service Ads (PSA)

• Suggest as altenate colour to display instead of your PSA. This will show an empty space with the background colour you suggest.
• Suggest an alternate ad to display instead of your PSA. Your ad will show in that space instead of the PSA if their is insufficient content.
• Place a collapsible ad. This ad will collapse and not show any PSA at all.

Source -> Quick Online Tips