Top five policy resources to know

Recently, we shared our 2012 resolutions in this post based on your feedback from our bi-annual publisher satisfaction survey. One of the key areas that we’re dedicated to improving is transparency around our program policies. This means clarifying the messaging that goes out in our notifications, but also pointing you to the right resources and contact forms to troubleshoot your policy issues.

Here, we’ve listed our top five policy resources to help you find the answers you’re looking for. By using the information listed below, you’ll not only learn more about our policies and how to avoid frequent violations, but you’ll also help us resolve your questions more efficiently as well.
  
1. Help Center
The AdSense Help Center is the best resource for you to gain policy knowledge and contact the policy team. We’re constantly adding and updating information to answer our most frequently asked questions. As you may have noticed, the Help Center has a new interface to better help you navigate topics of interest. You can read about all our policies by clicking on the sub-channels under "Policy & Traffic Quality Guidelines" on the homepage. We've included several examples in the "Content Policies" and "Ad Implementation Policies" sections to help you understand the policies more clearly. If you want to report or appeal a violation, use the "Troubleshooting and Issue Resolution" tool.

2. Blog
If you’re reading this now, you’ve already made the first step toward learning more about our policies. The AdSense blog contains a wealth of information from product updates, optimization tips, and upcoming publisher events. You’ll also find a special category for “Program Policies" listed on the right side which includes articles that deep dive into our policies to clarify common points of confusion (e.g. adult content, creating unique content) as well as best practices to help keep your account clean (e.g. invalid clicks, monitoring user-generated content). Get the latest updates sent to you by following the blog via email or feed.

3. Forum
The AdSense Help Forum is a platform for publishers to share best practices and interact with each other. The Forum can provide a wealth of information for AdSense questions related to our policies. Our Top Contributors contributed over 100K posts last year to the AdSense community, helping us to provide scalable support by answering publishers’ questions, and escalating urgent or unusual cases to the attention of Google employees.

4. Policy webinars
The AdSense policy team hosts online policy seminars from time to time in different regions. We provide policy trainings to clarify policies in detail and answer your questions. If you’re interested in attending future events like these, make sure that you’re opted in to ‘Special Offers’ in your email preferences within your AdSense account. Visit our Help Center to review our previous webinar recordings.

5. Email notifications & contacting us
Getting important messages to you is our priority, so ensure that your AdSense account has your most up-to-date email address. Additionally, you can view all policy notifications by visiting the Messages page, under the Home tab when you sign in to your AdSense account.

We know that you may occasionally need to escalate to us directly and you can do so by using the correct policy troubleshooter in the Help Center. Bear in mind that you’ll only receive responses from our team for answers which can't be found in our Help Center. Skim through previous policy blog posts or try typing in your question in the Help Forum to see if other publishers have had similar issues or questions. Chances are that we’ve addressed the most commonly asked questions, so you’ll be able to resolve your issues even quicker.

We hope the above resources will make your policy learning experience more enjoyable, efficient, and useful. Stay tuned for more policy information coming on our blog.

Posted by Lingjuan Zhang, 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.

2012: Our resolutions to improve AdSense for you

It's already a few weeks into the new year, but it's never too late to set resolutions. That’s why today we'd like to share the outcome of our bi-annual publisher satisfaction survey. If you’re opted in to receive occasional surveys from us, you may have seen or filled out this survey. Over 28,000 of you participated globally, and we received more than 33,000 comments on your favorite aspects about AdSense as well as changes you’d like to see.

The main areas of improvement that emerged from the survey are: AdSense Program Policies, AdSense Support, and Communication from AdSense. Your feedback is very important to us and we'd like to share some insights on what we've done in these areas so far and how we want to further improve them. We’re also working on improving in other important areas like payments and we'll continue to report back on those throughout the year.

AdSense Program Policies
Many of your comments in the survey showed that you’re interested in more transparency around our program policies and which ad implementations are allowed. We’ve started adding more resources like our regular blog posts about specifics of our program policies and we're also working on:

• Making the violation messaging clearer to ensure the actions you need to take are clearly highlighted.
• Providing you with more information on how to contact the AdSense policy team and where to find important resources.

AdSense Support
We know that it’s important for you to get quick answers to your questions, and that’s why we have a variety of support resources available. However, you’ve told us that you sometimes struggle to find the information you need, or would like to be able to address questions directly to our team. With this in mind, we’d like to address two main points:

• After a ground-up rebuild of our AdSense Help Center we’ll continue to focus on improving usability and content quality in 2012. We’ll also be testing more personalized support options and want to make the available levels of support clearer for you.
• In the coming months, we’re hosting events in various countries to give you the opportunity to meet the AdSense team in person, ask questions, and get optimization tips. We want to be more accessible for you, so opt in to our “Special Offers” emails in order to receive event invitations and watch out for more information on our Inside AdSense blog or the AdSense newsletter.

Communication from AdSense
As you might know, in addition to receiving messages in your AdSense account, you can subscribe to receive occasional emails from AdSense with performance suggestions, special offers, and newsletters. We asked for your thoughts on the emails we’ve been sending, and  based on your feedback, here’s where we’ll be focusing on making improvements:

• We’ll collect and share new case studies focusing especially on small to medium sized publishers, with examples from specific verticals or industries to make our optimization suggestions even more relevant for you and your website.
• Following your suggestion to feature more local updates, we’ll incorporate local content in our AdSense newsletter, whenever possible.

A big thank you to everyone who participated in this survey! If you’d like to participate and share your thoughts with us in upcoming surveys, make sure you update your email preferences to receive “occasional surveys to help us improve AdSense”.

Posted by Sophie Emmerich, on behalf of the AdSense Publisher Satisfaction Team

Top 5 things you should know about invalid clicks

During the AdSense team’s recent policy webinars, a number of publishers posted questions on our Google Moderator page about invalid click activity and the resources available to help them protect their accounts. We’ve brought in experts from the Ad Traffic Quality team to address your top questions about invalid clicks here in this post today.

As a quick introduction, our responsibility on the Ad Traffic Quality team is to monitor traffic across Google’s ad network and prevent advertisers from paying for invalid traffic. We’ve recently launched an in-depth Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, a site designed for both advertisers and publishers to learn more about invalid clicks. This site also aggregates various resources that help you learn about invalid clicks and maintain a successful AdWords or AdSense account. Please note that the resource center is currently only in English, but will be available in all languages shortly.

Now, onto the top 5 topics that publishers most frequently ask about, and some guidance from our team:  

1. Monitoring your ad traffic 

There’s a lot that you can and should do to monitor your site’s traffic and prevent it from receiving invalid activity. You can find all of our suggestions and best practices listed in our Help Center. If at any time you’d like to report something suspicious, feel free to contact us using this form.

2. Returning earnings to our advertisers

Protecting our advertisers' interests by monitoring invalid click activity is one of the key ways we strive to keep the network a balanced ecosystem where users, publishers, and advertisers can all grow and thrive together. To protect the integrity of our advertising environment, we return earnings from disabled AdSense accounts to affected advertisers, as stated in our Disabled Account FAQ.

3. Our mechanisms catch on to trends

Google uses real-time detection and filtering systems to examine each click on an AdWords ad. We look at numerous data points for each click, including the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. Our system then analyzes these factors to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account reports. Our engineers are constantly improving our monitoring technology, enhancing filters, and examining a growing set of signals.

In addition to our automated click protection techniques, we have a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When our system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important information about the source of the potentially invalid clicks.

4. How we determine sabotage

Sabotage, which some publishers refer to as ‘click bombing’, is an act committed by a third party to generate invalid activity on a publisher’s ads without their knowledge or permission. Although this topic often comes up on our forums and in the questions we’ve received, we’ve found that click bombing represents only a small fraction of invalid activity. As mentioned in point #3, we’re constantly improving our detection systems to identify these patterns of sabotage and filter them as invalid. We’re committed to protecting our publishers as well as our advertisers, as our goal is to grow the network while continuing to ensure that it is safe and enjoyable for all.

5. You can contact us if you feel your account was wrongfully disabled

We want to work with you and provide you as many resources as we can to resolve issues you may have. If your account has been disabled and you feel that the decision was made in error, we have a process for appealing the decision in your account. For more information, see our Help Center.

Posted by the Ad Traffic Quality Team

Policy Tips - Creating unique and valuable content

We enjoyed reading all your comments from our blog post on family-safe content. Today we’d like to shed some light on how to expand your business and attract more visitors by creating sites with unique and valuable content. This topic is one of our most asked about policies from publishers, and is often misunderstood because of the varying perspectives on what is considered unique and relevant content.

Creating a useful and information-rich site is essential to the AdSense business model to generate long-term revenue growth for publishers and to maintain a quality network. Not only does this enhance the user experience so your visitors stay longer to browse and possibly click on a relevant ad, but it also helps keep your account in good standing. Webmasters who clearly and accurately describe their content provide a much better user experience, and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit in the quality guidelines.

Copying content from other sites, auto-generating content, or rewriting content from other publications and monetizing these types of pages without permission or the necessary legal rights to do so is considered a violation of our program policies. If you see an article with content that you think would be interesting to share, or that you’re particularly passionate about, don’t copy it. Instead, write your own opinion regarding the issue. We love seeing the original and valuable content you come up with and we’ve found that our most successful partners are the ones that have developed a unique voice.

Some other things to keep in mind are to structure the layout of your site as intuitively as possible and to avoid confusing implementations that may unnaturally lead users to click on your ads or artificially inflate your impressions. Our policies around unique content also do not allow filling a page with keywords that are designed only to manipulate the targeting system and have no relation to the content or audience of the page. This practice results in badly matched ads, as well as a poor user experience. By adding unique content and services to your site, users will remember the added value and be more likely to visit again.

When creating a site, make the focal point about your users, not about search engine rankings or generating more clicks on ads. At Google, we grow our business with the notion “Focus on the users, and all else will follow,” and we hope you can also grow your business with us by following the same principle. Let’s make the AdSense network a clean and balanced environment, where you, the publishers, can grow together with users and advertisers.

Posted by Arudea Mahartianto, AdSense Policy Team

Policy webinars recap

Based on your feedback from our previous blog posts, we’ve heard you’d like to learn more about our policies. Over the past few months, the AdSense Policy team has hosted webinars with publishers from across North America, Russia, Turkey, Poland, Italy, and France. In keeping with our monthly policy tips, we’d like to take this time to recap on our recent publisher events and to summarize our findings for you.

Policies are in place for the success of publishers and advertisers. One of the common pieces of feedback we hear from AdSense publishers who are just starting out is that there’s a lot of information to read about the program. We understand that it can be challenging navigating our policies, and frustrating not being able to talk to a policy specialist directly. As a result, our policy team was available to answer your top questions during these recent webinars. In addition, the Policy team delivered a condensed overview of common policy violations to avoid and general best practices and tips to help maintain your account in good standing.

We went through a run-through of live demos and examples, which attendees told us were helpful. Many found that overall the sessions were helpful and that they gained a good understanding of our policies. Many publishers were unaware of the resources available to help you with policy notifications in our Help Center. We’ve posted your top policy questions and our answers on our Google Moderator page, which we encourage you to take a look at. If you’d like to listen to a recording of our presentation, please watch our YouTube video.

We’d like to thank all of you for your great feedback and questions. If you found the policy webinars valuable or have suggestions on which topics you’d like to hear about next, let us know by leaving a comment below. If you’re interested in attending future events like these, make sure that you’re opted in to ‘Special Offers’ in your email preferences within your AdSense account. We look forward to hosting more policy webinars in the future, and look for more policy updates from us by subscribing to the AdSense blog.

Posted by Cecelia Choi, AdSense Policy Specialist

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

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

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.

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

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