18 Common Mistakes by Google Adsense Publishers that Violate Terms

Google Adsense program is a popular web advertising program which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.

On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.

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 unit and 1 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.

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.

16. Only single referral button per product per page - With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only one referral button for adsense referral, adwords referral, 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!

quickonlinetips.com

Think Like Google with AdSense

A conversation with my son Matt confirmed my suspicion. The Google AdSense ads I recently installed on this website are actually giving me an insight into what the Google search engine spider cherry-picks from of my web page content.

It's not hard to imagine: AdSense ads are context sensitive. They exist as scripts on the web page. In order to be context sensitive, the script must initiate an indexing when the page is opened and refreshed.

Is there any reason to think that the indexing process performed by Google AdSense would be different from the process used by Google the search engine? None I can think of. Both indexing processes need to do the same job: extract core meaning from a page and compare it to a database.

In AdSense, the database contains paid ads waiting for a relevancy match. In search, the database holds keywords. But the meaning extracted from the web page could easily be identical.

Therefore, one might get a peek into the Google indexing algorithm by reviewing a series of web pages which display AdSense ads, and studying the ad content.

Studying AdSense Relevancy on Poingo.com

I studied the 30 or so pages on Poingo.com and checked the AdSense ads on each page for relevancy to the page content. Results were quite interesting.

The site contains a number of pages which present the features of various software or service offerings. Verbiage on these pages tends to be sparse and oriented toward key concepts.

On these product presentation pages, AdSense did a great job of extracting meaning.

For example, the page offering Poingo Email Printer, software which creates PDFs, was accompanied by AdSense ads which all pertained to PDF conversion. Text on the page was minimal, but the page title contained "create PDF", there were 3 keywords metatags containing "PDF", and the first paragraph contained "convert PDF" in bold.

From an indexing standpoint the page spoon-fed meaning to Google, and obviously there was a wellspring of PDF software advertisers for Google to find in its database. A match (or five matches to be exact) made in heaven!

Similarly, pages offering FTP software and an Outlook add-in received highly relevant companion ads. Again, words on the page were sparse, but page title and paragraph text contained the obvious words FTP and Outlook respectively, and Google AdSense took the bait like a trout succumbing to Robert Redford.

The three pages mentioned above offered essentially single concept offerings. PDF. FTP. Outlook. No confusing multiple choices.

When analyzing the page which offers Lightning Navigator, hotkey shortcut software with multiple features, AdSense picked one feature, screen capture, to orient 3 of the 5 the companion ads.

Interestingly, screen capture is listed seventh on the list of product features. It follows six other features which were all keyword-optimized but ignored by AdSense.

From previous research, I recall that keywords pertaining to screen capture such as "print screen", "screen shot", and "screen grab" receive many more clicks per day than other features such as "automatically create email" and "internet shortcut".

Apparently in this example, AdSense was quickly able to select the key concept for which it had the most ads to apply, and then threw most of its ad eggs in this basket.

Interaction between page and AdSense now becomes more interesting. Inventory of relevant advertisers becomes a factor in selecting key concept. That makes sense. You can't post an ad if it's not in the queue.

The non-screen capture ads on the Lightning Navigator page are as follows:
1 for shortcuts (highly relevant)
1 for surveillance equipment (huh??)

I have no doubt that there is a reason the surveillance equipment ad appeared, but it was not visible to me in the text of my page, the ad itself, or the page to which the ad linked. Mysteries abound in the "second-guess-the-Google-algo" world.

If your eyes are not bleary yet, stick around. There is more to tell.

Read the rest of this article on Poingo.com

Adsense and niche websites

“What niche should I choose for my site in order to make money with adsense?” I am sure many of you have heard this questions at least once.
First of all, I would not recomnend to anybody to start a website or a blog just to make money with adsense (or any kind of money-making program); I know that this is probably not what you would like to hear, but keep in mind that no matter what anybody tells you, it make take some time before you would gain a decent exposure on the web, and if you are not prepared for this, you’re in for a disappointment. You can not be successful at something if you don’t like it.

However, judging from another point of view, it is always nice to be rewarded for your hard work and commitment even if you don’t do it JUST for the money or in other words. sometimes is good to combine business with pleasure.

So let’s get to the point of this article. Why do some bloggers and website owners make more money with adsense than others, even though they have comparable traffic and they have carefully followed all the advices out there (such as ad placement and blending the adsense ads with the layout of the site)? In my opinion, in the end it all comes down to the actual niche of the website and the audience that is attracted by that specific niche.

You have to make sure that there is a market out there for the subject that you have chosen. You can not make a website about UFOs and expect to make money with adsense. I am not saying that you could not monetize it at all; if it attracts traffic, there are a lot of solutions to make money from it, but adsense will not be one of them.
The UFO example is a little bit extreme, but I gave it just to have a general idea. Politics and other topics of this kind fall into the same category.

In order to be able to make money with adsense you need to focus either on products or services. But still you need to think about the profile of the audience that you will attract depending on the topic of your website. For example a product related website will always make much more than a site about SEO, for 2 main reasons:

1-People that are visiting a website that is focused on reviewing a specific type of products (digital cameras, phones, etc.) are more likely to click on the adsense ads especially because there is a far better chance that the actual product that is advertised would interest them.

Visitors of a SEO website don’t give a damn about the ads as 90% of them will be most probably promoting ebooks.

2-Another reason would be because visitors of a SEO website are web-savy and they almost automatically avoid the ads, while for the other situation the audience may not even be interested if they click on an ad or another section of your website. This can vary depending of the nature of the products that you are promoting; many people say that websites dedicated to women and teenagers products have the highest CTR; and I tend to believe it. (web-money-advices.com)

Does AdSense Suck for Bloggers?

Nic Cubrilovic picks up on Guy Kawasaki’s posting his revenue and concludes that

'AdSense for bloggers sucks, the click-through rates are too low, the advertising is not relevant enough and readers of blogs are more accustomed to blocking-out the ads - all this results in a very low CPM rate.'

While I don't have time for a detailed post on this (I'm supposed to be packing as I write this) I would say that Nik's conclusion is pretty spot on…. when it comes to Guy Kawasaki's blog.

Guy writes to a pretty tech savvy audience (who tend to not click ads), he writes on a fairly broad range of topics (AdSense would have trouble honing in on what ads to serve him) and he doesn't generally write about products or specific services (again making it hard to get him high paying and relevant ads).

As a result I'm not surprised that Guy was earning relatively small amounts from his blog from AdSense (when he was using it).

However - just because Guy's blog doesn't make much money from AdSense doesn't mean that it sucks for all blogs. In fact I've surveyed my readers three times on their AdSense earnings (here, here and here) and while the poll showed the majority of bloggers don't make much from AdSense it also showed that some definitely do.

Llast time I did the survey 24% of respondents said they earn over $500 a month (some quite considerably more) and a further 21% earned over $100 for the month). I would suspect that the vast majority of those had less traffic than Guy.

How can this be so?

From my own personal experience of blogging and from watching others I would guess that the majority of those earning more than Guy did would be doing so because of a number of factors:

Topic - more focussed and possibly on a more commercially viable topic (ie product related). This leads to higher paying ads and higher relevancy of ads (and higher click through rates).
Readership - while Guy's readership is probably quite aware of what an ad is and isn't and will actively avoid them - in my experience the average web user (the non blogging/web 2.0/geek crowd) is not as adverse to clicking ads.
Ad Positioning/Design - I can't comment on how Guy had his ads positioned and designed - but it can be the difference between great and terrible AdSense performance.

Of course I'm not suggesting Guy change his topic, readership or blog design. However this might help explain why he didn't earn as much as other bloggers are from AdSense.

How else could Guy Monetize his Blog?

Let me explore a few options:

Indirect Income Streams - Ultimately the way Guy should (and probably is) monetizing his blog is indirectly by building his own profile. In a sense he's advertising himself and as a result is building a loyal audience for future books, speaking engagements and consulting work. More on indirect methods of earning money from a blog here.

Private Sponsorship - I think a better model for Guy to earn money from his blogs would be private sponsorship or a privately arranged CPM campaign. He still could have problems with this however because of his broad topic - but if he could find someone who had a product or service that was relevant or that matched his readership demographic he could be onto a good thing with his readership levels.

Affiliate Programs? - Another possible revenue stream that would probably do well for Guy would be affiliate marketing. The products that he promoted would need to be of a high quality, products that he'd personally used and genuinely recommended and he'd have to be careful about pushing them too hard - however if he found the right products I suspect his loyal readership would react well it (especially with his ability to sell) - and if he picked the right product (of a high value) he could earn some nice coin form it too.

Other Ad Programs - Text-Link-Ads would do well on Guy's blog as it's got a good SE ranking. I suspect they'd earn more than what AdSense did each month. Similarly BidVertiser, Performancing Partners and either Feedburner's Ad network or TLA's Feedvertising would be good ways to monetize his RSS feeds (nb: some affiliate links in this paragraph).

Again - it's the indirect money making methods that I suspect Guy is focussing upon most and will ultimately do best with (unless he turns his blog into a product blog).

More Google Adsense Tips

Google Adsense is hot, hot, hot! I certainly hope you can feel the flames. They're there. Yesterday I wrote some tips to help you capitalize on this moneymaker that’s sweeping the internet. Although many trends on the internet come and go like snowflakes in Arizona sun, this one appears to have real staying power for people who do it the right way.

Today, I’m going to give you just a few more tips that escaped me yesterday.

1. Start right away. Don’t wait. You can put up a simple website on your passion, your hobby or your profession and begin to attract unique visitors to it. Monetize your site with Google Adsense and let the money roll in.

You say you don’t know anything about building a website? Then get a blog, even a free one on MySpace.com. No excuses!

2.Become a student. Learn all you can about Adsense. When you set up your account, Google has tutorials for you, Q and A and the ability to contact them directly. When in doubt about anything, don’t just do it, find the answer or contact them directly. They are strict and could shut off your lovely income stream if you violate their rules.

3.Quantity of pages is important. The thinking here is that the more Goggle Adsense monetized pages you have, the more money you’ll make.

There are two schools of website construction that go along with this. One says that you put up a whole bunch of garbage sites with thousands of pages and lots of links and little or no content. The other school says that you put up a few super high quality sites with a gazillion pages of highly relevant content.

Personally I absolutely hate it when I click on a link and it takes me one of those garbage sites. I click out as fast as possible. It’s your decision.

4. Segment your sites for variety and to give yourself more money-making options. Not every page has to be an Adsense page. Some others can sell your own products, affiliate products or contain pure content to get more search engine traffic to your site.

I hope this will inspire you to action. Nothing is greater than the first tip of this article…Just Do It! Nike was right. (Carolyn McClendon - blog.worldvillage.com)

Adsense Tips and Tricks

With personal and commercial blogs, community websites, and social pages becoming the hot topic of the Internet in the last few years, many people have become more Internet-literate and are always looking for ways to make a few hundreds or even thousands from their websites.  This is when Google Adsense comes into play.  Google Adsense, unlike Affiliate Programs, is CPC (Pay-Per-Click) and the good thing about it, is you can still earn some bucks without making a sale. 

As with any other things in this world, it takes time, effort and dedication before you could earn some decent amount from Google Adsense.  And here are some of the tips and tricks to help you with your Google Adsense journey. 

Layout

1. Blend your ads to your website layout
This could be considered as one the most important things which is often overlooked.  Instead of using predefined colors provided by Google, try changing colors of your ads to match the website layout.  For example, if your website uses white background with green text, make sure you use the same colors for your ads. 

2. Do not display a border
While you can’t get rid of the border around your ad, you can make it invisible by changing the border color to that of the background.  Researches have shown that ads without a visible border generate much higher clicks than those with one. 

3. Do not place your ads in normal spots
Internet users have become accustomed to the normal ad spots (eg: a Leaderboard above your header, a Skyscrapper outside the content) and hence, any ads placed in those normal spots will often be ignored. 

4. Choose the right ad formats
There are a few ad formats which perform better than others.  Some of the recommended ad formats are Wide Skyscrapper, Medium Rectangle and Horizontal Ads Links.  However, these ad formats may not necessarily work for everyone, so choose the ones that work for you. 

5. Good layout design
Although a good layout design does not necessarily increase your Adsense revenue, it is important for the first impression and also for the professionalism. 

Content

5. "Content is the king"
The fact that Google Adsense is contextual advertising implies that the ads being generated are often relevant to the website content.  That simply means you will not get any relevant ads if the content does not focus on a certain topic or the content is not text based.  For example, if your page does not have any copy/text but an image, it’s unlikely to get relevant ads.

6. Pick a high paying topic
It took me a while to find out that some keywords are being paid more than others.  While Google does not tell you how much advertisers are paying for their keywords, it is pretty easy to guess.  For example, ads about credit cards, home loans and insurance are being paid more than those ads about free blogging tool, yellow pages, etc.   It is also recommended to pick a Niche topic and provide a narrow focus than to pick a general topic. 

7. Update your website frequently
Updating your website frequently enables you to get more visitors checking out your website which increases your page impression and the probability of ad clicks. 

8. Write quality content
Not everyone possesses a natural talent in writing, and I can say for sure that I don’t.  However, if you offer something useful, interesting, and put your heart into writing, your readers will enjoy what you have to say.  And they will be coming back for more. 

Organization

9. A good organizer is the winner
With Google Adsense, you can organize your ads and have a clear idea about their performance by using Channels.  This way, if a particular ad is not performing well, you could always replace it with a difference one.  There are quite a few things you could do with Channels and this is just one of them. 

10. Monitor your statistics
Checking both your website and Adsense statistics enables you to get better ideas about your audiences.  From your website statistics, you can find out which pages are being viewed the most, where most of your traffics come from, what the peak day of the week is, etc.  Similarly, Adsense statistics will tell you which ad formats are being clicked the most, how many page impressions you receive, how much you are making each day/week/month, etc.  You can then make improvements based on these figures to maximize the performance. 

Traffics

11. Link Building
No matter how good your website is and how relevant your Adsense ads are, without a decent amount of traffics, you will only be making a small amount of revenue, if any.  It is not easy to achieve a decent amount of traffics, but it is not impossible.  Some of the most common ways to gain traffics to your website include Link exchange, Directory listing, participating in online communities and making use of social bookmaking systems.     

12.  Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most successful and recommended methods of gaining traffics to your website and it is more than just a buzz word.  Optimizing your websites for search engines increases your website visibility and ranking, which in turn generates significant amounts of targeted and relevant traffics to your website.  Combined, search sites reach more than 130 million Americans or approximately 85 percent of all Internet users each month, ranking Search/Navigation among the most popular categories on the Web. (Source: comScore Media Metrix) 

Miscellaneous

13. A little maintenance goes a long way
Many people tend to overlook the maintenance part of the website.  In this case, rather than sticking to the same ad formats, or the same positioning of the ads, try experiment with different formats and positioning.  If they do not work, you could always revert the changes.  But if they do, that’s a bonus for you. 

14. Do not click on your own ads
Honesty is the best policy.  Be honest with yourself, and do not try to increase your Adsense revenue by clicking on your own ads.  Google is really strict when it comes to fraud clicking, and before you knew it, your account could be banned and you could be owing some money to the advertisers. 

15. When in doubt, ask
If you have some questions in mind, or are unclear about certain stuffs, don’t hesitate to ask the Google Adsense Help Team.  Before asking them, though, you could do them a favor by checking out their Frequently Asked Questions and Answers page.

I hope you will find the above tips and tricks useful in improving your website to increase your Adsense revenue.  While it is always good to earn some cash from your website, do not let it rule you or your website.  And remember that no money is easy money and it takes a considerable amount of time, effort and dedication before one could see a marked improvement in his Adsense revenue. (Ei Sabai Nyo - eisabainyo.net)

GoldAge

Except Google Adsense, there are several service that will pay you. Click here or on the banner to join



GoldAge pays you for discussion (making new posts or replying in existing posts). You can earn points only if you have 10 or more reputation points (everyone starts out with 10). Earning points can be transferred into ecurrency units. They use egold and liberty-reserve as payment option. Minimum payout is $10 or 1000 points. Being active member, you can deposit your points to vBank and earn 2% interest every two days.

You can earn credits on posting $0.10 for a new thread/poll and $0.05 for a reply, except four forums: Advertising, Off-topic, Questions about forum and International forums do not give points to members. Off-topic posts do not provide useful information about the digital currency industry and cannot be rewarded.

Each time someone follows this link to GoldAge Forums and registers as a new member, your referral count will be incremented by one, you will receive 5 points and get 10% commission from any points that member earned.

MyLot

Except Google Adsense, there are several service that will pay you. Click here or on the banner to join



MyLot will pay you to start or respond discussions with other member. You get 1 cents minimum for each response you post or when someone responds to your topic. Your rating in the site goes up by 1 for each unique discussion you take part in or when someone responds to the discussions started by you for the first time. They pay you based on the quality of the posts you make. so, if you really make a worthy reply, you can expect 5-10 cents for a reply.

Respond to as many discussions as possible and earn. You can make 1-2$ a day if you work for an hour. Try getting some referrals too. If you work really hard, you can earn much more.

They paid by paypal and e-gold, $10 payout.

No-minimum

Except Google Adsense, there are several service that will pay you. Click here or on the banner to join



No-minimum.com is Paid To Read (PTR) email program that will pays you for reading email, click ads, signup program, use their manual signup or other activity. Also you will get % from yoour referral earning.

You will pay by e-gold (Minimum Withdraw: $0.01) or Paypal (Minimum Withdraw: $1)

Instant E-gold

Except Google Adsense, there are several service that will pay you.



Just click a banner or link (on home page), enter your e-gold number and after 30 seconds you will get $0.01

Instant E-gold site' is a system which offers a possibility for it members to earn $823,543.00 in e-gold just for $ 7 with 7 x 7 matrix

Here at Instant E-gold you are in control, simply buy a banner ad or text link and it will be added directly. Buy what you can afford today starting from only one ad. You get only UNIQUE visitors, because 1 click per IP is allowed.

Click here to join

Why are my AdSense ads not related to my topic?

This is a common question for people who are using Google AdSense, and there are a variety of reasons why you might find that it's not targeting good ads on your site. Let's talk about the major causes and I'll explain how to remedy each of them.

The most common cause is that your keyword density is too low. You might not have heard of this SEO jargon, but the logic is straightforward: if you have a blog about knife self-defense, for example, you need to actually have the phrase knife self-defense on your site at least once every 2-3 paragraphs.

All too commonly, writers find that they refer to "it" or, in your case, "self defense" or "protection" or other synonyms. A synonym is a good tool for writing, but it can be counterproductive for having search engines or ad engines accurately identify the primary topic of your article.

Another facet of this is if you have lots and lots of non-article material on your pages (promotional text, ad copy, link lists) you can confuse the ad engine about just what actually is the point of the page. This can best be addressed by adding AdSense section targeting, as explained here: AdSense Section Targeting.

A second problem you might be encountering is that there are simply too few bids on your exact keywords in the AdSense system (technically, AdWords, as that's the "advertiser" side of the AdSense coin). You can ascertain this by opening up an AdWords account and bidding on a few of the most important keywords in your space. Does a bid of $0.05 give you top placement? That means that there aren't any other advertisers!

Another way to test is to use a tool like Nichebot. When I go there and search for "knife self-defense" shows that it was only searched for 15 times in the last 12 months (in their database, at least). That's incredibly rare, and strongly suggests that you need to come up with either a broader focus for your blog (by comparison, "self defense" was sought 782,000 times) or come up with a different description of your content to be more findable.

Finally, if you do these and use these techniques and still find that your ads aren't a good match, you might email Google's AdSense support team and ask them for some suggestions. I've found them friendly, helpful and reasonably responsive, and it is in their best interest to be matching your content as closely as possible.

Hope that helps you get up and running with better ads. (askdavetaylor.com)