Quick Online Tips

Google Adsense Ads Below Post Titles Not Allowed

Posted: 26 Aug 2008 10:03 AM CDT

Most blogs place Google Adsense Ads below the post title and above article content, to get better ad visibility and a higher clickthrough rate to make more money, but it is not always allowed as per Google Adsense policies. We recently got an email from Adsense support pointing out this issue on our site.

Google had earlier clarified some commonly encountered issues and one of them was “Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.” They showed this example violating the terms, where the ads are places directly below the post title.

Adsense Violation

Also note that Google Adsense program policies, clearly say that Publishers participating in the AdSense program -

May not encourage users to click the Google ads by using phrases such as “click the ads,” “support us,” “visit these links,” or other similar language
May not place misleading labels above Google ad units - for instance, ads may be labeled “Sponsored Links” but not “Favorite Sites”

Post titles can violate Adsense Guidelines

Post titles act as labels - If you have posts titles like “Hot deals of the day”, or “Best Articles of June”, or “3 best imaging software”, or “download vista now”, then the targeted ads that appear beneath these articles can truly mislead visitors to click these ads and inflate advertiser costs.

Blogs are different - But since bloggers place the adsense code in the blog template, it is difficult to tweak the placement on every post. Of course you can change selected titles so that it has a lesser clicking impact, but it is difficult to optimize hundreds of article titles.

What can you do - Most blogs insert Date and Categories beneath the Post title which separate the ads. But apparently this is not enough, as they informed me that the title can still mislead visitors to click. They advised that “publishers may not label the Google ads with text other than ’sponsored links’ or ‘advertisements’. Inadvertently the blog post titles were acting as a labels above the ads. Thus to comply with the terms, we had to introduce the word “Advertisements” over our Adsense units, when they cleared the issue.

Its too common - As I browse around popular blogs, there are many blogs that place ads directly under titles, or place title, date and categories above the ads. This has obviously been inspired by the Adsense optimization chart which prompts you to place ads above your primary content.

I thank the Google enforcement team, which was kind enough to send prompt feedback and helped us fix the issue. This is another of the common adsense mistakes to avoid and its a good idea to fix it before Google comes calling…

Will Google ban your adsense account? Once the Adsense team identifies a problem in Adsense placement on your site, they usually send an email explaining the issue and give you a few days time to fix it. It is best to respond quickly and politely and fix the issue promptly. The Adsense team is very helpful, but you have to comply with their terms.

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2008/08/26