Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Adsense Rules

Introduction

If you're going to use Adsense then its important that you play by the rules both for your own benefit and everyone else's. Remember that Google haven't become the biggest advertising business on the internet without being strict and banning people who break the rules.


We have listed the quickest way to get banned from Adsense so you can AVOID them all:


Do not encourage users to click your ads in any way

Do not put ads on pages with no content, pop-up, pop-under, error page, registration or similar pages.

Do not overlap ads with content that users cannot distinguish between

Do not use automated bots to increase clicks on your site

Do not encourage or participate in 'click groups' that click each others ads. Google have been known to set these groups up to get people banned.

Make sure you don't display more than the maximum number of ads on a page. Check with the Google Adsense rules. Here are the current limits; 3 Ad units, 1 Link unit, 2 Adsense for Search boxes and a maximum of 2 Referrals (of the same product). Check the most up to date rules to be sure you are not breaking them

Do not create more than one Adsense account. You CAN have more than one site for a single Adsense account.

Do not edit or modify the Adsense code (this does not include changing properties)

Do not redirect users away from any advertisers page

Do not click your own ads (not even to test them)

Do not display pornographic, hatred or any other banned content

Do not buy banned sites, typically MFA from others



Banned from Adsense

A lot of people get banned simply because they break the rules and then expect Google to just forgive them. For some others, a ban can be a complete surprise and a worrying one. If you become the victim to a ban and feel that your were wrongly banned then see our 'Banned from Adsense' section.

How to boost your AdSense revenue

AdSense often easier than affiliate programs


Google's AdSense is a superb revenue generating opportunity for small, medium and large web sites.

Some webmasters are designing brand new sites specifically for serving AdSense text ads. (It's against the AdSense rules to design a site purely for AdSense, so you'll want to include a few affiliate links or sell your own product, too.)

Here's the background info:

AdSense overview
AdSense FAQ
AdSense tech FAQ

AdSense policies

AdSense allows you to serve text-based Google AdWords on your web site and receive a share of the pay-per-click payment. AdSense ads are similar to the AdWords ads you see on the right-hand side at Google when you do a search there.

AdSense is having a huge impact on the affiliate marketing industry. It's often much easier to generate revenue from AdSense than from an affiliate program.

Weak affiliate merchants will die faster than ever.

If you're a merchant running a lousy affiliate program, now's the time to improve it FAST.


AdSense's advantages

AdSense is simple to join.

It's easy to paste a bit of code into your pages.

It's free to join.

You don't have to spend time finding advertisers.

Google provides well written, highly relevant ads - chosen to closely match the content on your pages.

You don't have to waste time choosing different ads for different pages.

You don't have to mess around with different code for various affiliate programs.

You're free to concentrate on providing good content and Google does the work of finding the best ads for your pages from 100,000 AdWords advertisers.

It's suitable for beginners or marketing veterans.

AdSense provides simple, easy-to-understand stats.

If you have affiliate links on your site, you ARE allowed to add AdSense ads. However, with your affiliate links, you must not mimic the look and feel of the Google ads.

You can filter up to 200 URLs, so you can block ads for sites that don't meet your standards. You can also block strong competitors.

Inevitably, AdSense is competing strongly for space on web sites with all other revenue sharing opportunities.

If you own a small web site you can plug a bit of AdSense code into your site and almost instantly relevant text ads that are likely to appeal to your visitors will appear on your pages.

If you own several sites, you need apply only once. This makes AdSense much simpler than joining a bunch of affiliate programs.

As you can see, I'm really keen on this revenue sharing service.


Disadvantages

One problem is inappropriate ads. You don't want spammy junk advertised on your site. Google's standards probably aren't as high as yours. You can filter out 200 URLs, but in some industries that won't be enough.

The stats Google supplies are inadequate. They're easy to understand at a glance. However, they don't tell you exactly which ads people are clicking on, or which keywords are involved. That's frustrating.

Also, I'd like to be able to identify and block ads that have very low payout rates, without doing a lot of sleuthing and messing around.

The ad panels say "Ads by Google" - free advertising for Google. You don't earn anything if someone clicks on that link.

The minimum payout is $100, which is regarded as too high by sites which don't receive much traffic. That won't worry experienced webmasters.

Also, sites that want to display AdSense ads may not include "other content-targeted and/or text-based ads on the pages displaying AdWords ads." However, human beings review the sites. Rejected sites have been able to appeal successfully.

Another disadvantage is that Google doesn't allow you to share your stats with other webmasters. The AdSense Terms and Conditions say:

"Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google's prior written consent. 'Google Confidential Information' includes without limitation: ... (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to you by Google..."

That's really weird. Web site owners need to be able to share such information and discuss successes and failures.

A big disadvantage of the service is that Google doesn't say how much its AdSense partners will receive. You'll just receive an unknown share of the revenue.

Only a company with the goodwill and respect Google has earned could get away with such a cheeky offer.

Google says:

"How much will I earn through this program? The AdWords ads you are able to display on your content pages are cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means that advertisers pay only when users click on ads. You'll receive a portion of the amount paid for clicks on AdWords ads on your website. Although we don't disclose the exact revenue share, our goal is to enable publishers to make as much or more than they could with other advertising networks."

So the only way to know how much you'll earn is to try it and see. If you want to bail out, all you have to do is remove the code from your site.

Don't put all your eggs in the AdSense basket. If Google discovers fraudulent clicks on ads appearing on your pages, it can dump your site from the service, and refuse to pay you all revenue owed. Some webmasters who claim total innocence have had this happen to them.

Google has made several changes to its AdSense FAQ, clarifying varying things. For example, it IS possible to apply for separate accounts for separate web sites. I've done so, and checked with Google that it's OK in my case. Read the rules - they look ambiguous to me. If in doubt, ask first!

Some time after the launch of AdSense, Google added "channels" which improve the tracking. I strongly recommend that you experiment with these.

Sites with "excessive advertising" are being rejected.

Adsense - Essential Content For Sites

To know why Adsense is essential for your content sites is to know first how this works.

The concept is really simple, if you think about it. The publisher or the webmaster inserts a java script into a certain website. Each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click.

The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics which could be a time-consuming task in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pulls the Adsense ads. Also webmasters are less concerned by the lack of information search engines are providing and are more focused in making cash from these search engines.

The first reason why Adsense is essential for content sites is because it already has come a long way in understanding the needs of publishers and webmasters. Together with its continuous progression is the appearance of more advanced system that allows full ad customization. Webmasters are given the chance to choose from many different types of text ad formats to better complement their website and fit their webpage layout.

The different formatting enables the site owners the possibility of more click through from visitors who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. It can also appeal to the people visiting thus make them take that next step of looking up what it is all about. This way the people behind the Adsense will get their content read and making profit in the process.

The second reason is the ability of the Adsense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing but also the earnings based on the webmaster-defined channels. The recent improvements in the search engines gives webmasters the capability to monitor how their ads are performing using customizable reports that has the capacity to detail page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. Webmasters and publishers can now track specific ad formats, colors and pages within a website. Trends are also easily spotted.

With the real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be assessed quickly. There would be time to sort out the contents that people are making the most clicks on. The ever-changing demands would be met while generating cash for the webmasters and publishers. The more flexible tools are also allowing webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which will provide them some accurate insight on which pages, ads and domains are performing best.

The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated having their ads served on targeted websites. Thus increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product and services. All because of the content and its constant maintenance. As opposed to those who are no using Adsense in their sites, they are given the option of having other people do their content for them, giving them the benefit of having successful and money-generating web sites.

Adsense is all about targeted content, the more targeted your content is, the more target the search engines’ ads will be. There are some web masters and publishers who are focused more on their site contents and how best to maintain them rather than the cash that the ads will generate for them. This is the part where the effectiveness is working its best.

There was a time when people were not yet aware of the money to be achieved from advertisements. The cash generated only came into existence when the webmasters and publishers realized how they can make Adsense be that generator. In those days, the content was the most important factors that are taken quite seriously. It still is. With the allure of money, of course.

So don’t waste your web site without putting Adsense, it may take some time to work on, but the return is still may help you make some money, which we call the MSI – multi source of income.

Do You Make These Mistakes With Adsense?

Don't you think it is fascinating that with so many Adsense publishers, all setting up hundreds of sites, they have absolutely no idea who their clients are? The first rule of setting up and maintaining a successful business is thorough knowledge of your client.

Let's flip the coin and look at it from another angle. Google does not pay you for clicks on your site; the Adwords advertiser is forking out the money for your checks. The reason why he advertises is to sell a product or service or to drive people to his site for a subscription or whatever reason. He is doing it to gain a business advantage.

The question here is: Are you giving him an advantage or are you just costing him money?

You have heard "˜Adsense is dead' or "˜there is not so much money to be made from Adsense as in the past'. Most Adsense publishers think they have to set up a few more sites which will make up for the lost income. Dead wrong.

The reason for the downward spiral in Adsense income originates from untargeted ads on web pages. Most people would love to place the blame at the doorstep of Google, but this is not the case. The problem lies with the publishing of thousands of websites solely intended to get clicks, thus optimized for the search engine and not giving a second thought to the advertiser from Adwords.

The result from the misuse of Adsense is obvious. In most of the current Adwords information products one of the first warnings you are given when placing AdWords ads is to remove the link to advertise on the content network. The reason is simple; the ads appear on untargeted pages leading to untargeted customers. This is a waste of the advertiser's money and a direct loss of income for the Adsense publisher. All the serious Adwords advertisers are not advertising on the content network, which in turn leads to less competition. The cost per click on a content page is far less that the cost on a generic page search.



Adwords and Adsense will never die and is and will remain one of the top income earners for many internet marketers.

So what now? The answer lies in improved sites with quality content. Play with the search engine not against it. If you want to compete with a search engine start your own. Not impossible, Google did it and succeeded.

So what exactly is improved content?

The keywords you are optimizing for should relate to your web content and add value for the visitor. This does not mean you have to write one thousand word pages all on your own. One to two hundred words per page will be fine as long as it answers the question or part of the question that the visitor was searching for with the search term. From there on the page can lead to Adsense ads and a click on the link will be a targeted visitor for the advertiser.

You also do not need to write each page yourself, you can still use PLR content and articles for your sites just make sure that the main question that the visitor would have when searching for that term is answered and lead them further to more specific information through Adsense ads.

Can you imagine the joy on your face when receiving a five figure check from Adsense, and think of the joy you would place on the face of the Adwords advertiser also receiving a five figure payday?

Once you have your site set up correctly there are a few elements that you need to give attention to. The truth about Adsense placement is that there is a trick to it. For high CTR your ad placement must be highly optimized.

I have seen this myself in testing different Adsense placement methods. One placement for all does not work. On certain pages it would be higher up and on others it would be lower down.

It is all dependent on the content of the page and the question you should ask yourself is at which point in the content is the visitor the most likely to want more specific information. If you write your content yourself you should write it in such a way that you give information and then raise curiosity, and it is at that point where your ad should appear for the first time. By utilizing this method and keeping your content targeted you will receive many clicks and your Adwords advertiser will receive the targeted visitors he wants.

Are you beginning to see how important it is to get the content and your ads right Now, let me ask you this: Are you one of the Adsense publishers who are costing advertiser's money or are you one that actually help make advertisers money?

Don't Get Caught With Google Adsense Click Fraud

Many web site owners are getting their Google Adsense account terminated when they have done nothing wrong to deserve the punishment. Considering the money that they are getting from Adsense, they would certainly want to get back into it.

Considering the money to be made with Adsense, it is no wonder that they would want to get back into it.

It is that same consideration why the Google Adsense click fraud is thought of and why many people are getting into it.

Click fraud is the act of clicking on ads for the purpose of costing the advertiser money. It is simply the same as paying out cash for false leads. Many people website owners are aware of this fraud and are sharing the same sentiment that this is the one big problem that Adsense is facing.

How do you prevent being involved in this fraud?

Majority of web hosts are offering access logs. Once this is offered to you, it is necessary that you hand it over to Google as well. This allows them to look for any suspicious activity on your site. Problems like this are very serious and giving it to them is saying that you would want to help them in any way you can in solving the problem.

It can also help if you have a click monitoring software. If you do not have one yet, you should try and get one. There is absolutely no major factor preventing you from having one because most of this software is free.

As usual, all the information you have received should be turned over to Google. This is showing Google that you too are fighting against click frauds and is in no way a part of it.

Study your server logs and watch for any activity that seems suspicious. Report anything that you may find odd, may it big or small thing.

You may want to consider disabling ads for your own IP address and local geographic area. This will certainly prevent accidents and will not make Google mistake another user as you. You can do through a htaccess file. This will avoid Google mistaking as clicking on your own ads and be kicked out because of it.

Keep your Adsense off on pop ups and pop unders. Your ads should not be displayed on content sites that promote illegal activity or tampering of the legal rights of other people or business. Included in this are the content that is considered adult and gambling ones. If you think that you may be breaking this rule, immediately remove your content or Adsense from the web page.

Be truthful and confess up to Google about times when you might have clicked on your own as, whether accidentally or intentionally. Or the times when you have done something that is against the Terms of Service that they are implementing. Be honest about anything that you may have done that is wrong. Confessing is way better than Google learning about it eventually. It would mean eventual termination and no getting back what you have worked so hard for.

Do not tell your family or friends about Adsense on your website. Chances are they may start clicking on them to help you make money without you knowing it. They may be doing more harm to you than help by trying it in the first place.

If ever someone you know chanced upon your Adsense, make sure they understand that they cannot click on your ads under any circumstances. It would be wise to brief them on important things about Adsense and what not to do with them.
Most pay per click networks have different measures in hand to protect website owners against click frauds. Other search engines can track more than 50 data points, IP address, browser’s information, user’s session info and pattern recognition. They also have “systems” available that detects fraud. Not to mention the specialized teams monitoring how things are going and helping advertisers stop click frauds.

Google offers suggestion on how to avoid click fraud. Using “negative keywords” can be used to keep your Adsense showing on products and services that are in no way related to yours. Adding tracking URLs to your links so you can track the traffic coming from Google.

Adsense Sites: Can Beginners Make Money with AdSense Sites?

If you are in Internet marketing or have been reading the ads all over the Internet about how to make money from your website you can't have missed all the talk of AdSense. This is one of Google's main revenue generators and over the few years it has been around has made quite a few early adopters a lot of money.

Google makes a percentage of the cost of the ads and the website owner where the ads show up makes the remaining percentage. The AdSense ads are actually the ads placed through Google's AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program.

Unfortunately as with all good things it seems, the money making potential seems to have diminished for the majority of those trying to make a go of AdSense as a viable money maker. That is not to say you can't make money off the AdSense program, it's just not as easy as it apparently was. Unfortunately I was not one of those who made good money off AdSense ads.

Regardless of all the ads promoting really big money from AdSense and the fact that there are still people collecting big profits from it, let's look at it through the eyes of someone just getting into the program in earnest. Someone like many of us that do not have a large source of traffic, or maybe even no traffic to sites we want to add AdSense to. In many cases we might have sites made specifically to be monetized with AdSense. Is it worthwhile to have sites specifically designed to make its income from AdSense ads? I say sites because it is not logical to think someone with a site that does not yet have a huge amount of traffic to believe they can make lots of money from a single site with AdSense on it.

Not going into details, the Google AdSense program is where a website owner has joined the AdSense program and allows Google to place AdSense ads on their website. When a visitor to the website clicks on an AdSense ad the website owner makes a few cents to many dollars from that click. How much you make is dependent on several factors such as the market the ad is trying to capture clicks from, the efficiency of the ad, the keywords the ad is focusing on and other factors. Certain types of ads almost always pay more per click than others. Insurance, loans, and finance ads pay a lot more than an ad for garden tools or gift baskets or paper plates, etc. would pay.

Real Life Example

I decided to give AdSense a try and see if I could make an average of $5 a day from a site designed to be monetized with AdSense ads. The sites are essentially sites with articles on them based on the theme of the site. I wrote some of the articles but purchased most of them. Articles to be added to the sites in the future will be mostly purchased due to lack of time to write articles myself. They are the content of the sites. The sites are mostly written in html, although I do have a few that are php coded sites.

On the pages with the articles are the AdSense ads, usually three blocks of ads on a page. The sites are small with most being about nine to 15 pages total. Adding articles on a regular basis will slowly build up the sites over time which is what the search engines want to see. I started with twenty new AdSense sites and three older blog sites I already had, plus two new portal sites that had no traffic going to them. All sites were monetized with AdSense.

The AdSense sites cost nothing, but the few articles on each site cost about eight dollars each. Articles can cost from about twenty-five cents to fifteen dollars or more depending on the source and quality. The lower cost articles require considerable rewriting so as not to cause your article to be considered a duplicate article and incur a so-called duplicate content penalty.

Allowing for placing five articles a month on a site plus some miscellaneous costs like hosting, domain name, software, and potential maintenance costs, a fifty dollar monthly cost per site is incurred. Yes you could write all or most of the articles yourself, but that is not practical if you have many sites and is very time consuming. So I am discounting that solution as impractical if you have many sites. So to break even on these types of AdSense sites each site needs to make about $50 a month. That’s an average of $1.70 a day.

A measly $1.70 a day, that should be easy for a site to make. Maybe it is, but it is heavily dependent on the traffic to the site and the corresponding clicks on the AdSense ads that result from it. To put things in perspective, look at the results of my twenty AdSense sites, three blogs, and two portal sites. All sites except the three older sites have been up slightly over three months. I started getting a few links to each site just this past month.

Real Life Terrible Results

Only last month did I start getting links to any of the sites. I am averaging about $1 a day from all twenty-five sites together. That’s about $25 a month total, far less than break even cost. I just checked today and have made $50.55 for this current month, month four for most sites. That's about one twenty-fifth of what I need to break even for the sites. Half the money came from the twenty AdSense sites, with the rest from the other five sites. There are still two more days left in this month.

I believe the results will continue to improve as long as I add articles and get links to the sites. It is a long way to go until the sites break even, if they ever do, so I am not holding my breath. Although these results are terrible, in my opinion, it must be mentioned that I am doing this part-time and only recently has there been an effort to get links to the sites. If it had been a full-time effort (and it could easily have been) then the results would seem even worse. I have totally ignored the effort (which has been considerable) in getting the sites up and working properly, correcting and adding the articles and revising the links for each new article I added to the site.

I do have software that would easily generate such sites, but decided not to use it due to leaving footprints and having the sites considered spam sites by Google or the other two top search engines. From the looks of it right now it's too early to make an accurate judgment as to whether the sites will be worthwhile. I tend to think the effort is too great the way my sites are set up now and the cost of the articles too high to make a decent long term profit. I figure I need to revise how the articles are added and probably get the cost of the articles down a lot more, to less than half what I am paying now to have a fair chance to break even, let along make a profit.

Is AdSense Worthwhile for Beginners?

So the question, can beginners make money with AdSense sites cannot be answered yet with any accuracy from my results so far. On the surface it appears the answer is no, not if following my route. Only if extraordinary amounts of traffic can be obtained does it look like my sites will make any decent money from AdSense. Probably another, a better approach, will be necessary and a lot more pages with AdSense ads on it will be required to be able to make any significant money. I suspect I will need at least 50 to 100, or more, articles per site to have a fair chance of creating a small part-time equivalent income from the sites.

If you consider an average cost of six dollars for an article, and that is a very low cost for a new article, and still the same five articles a month, with just half the estimated ten dollars monthly miscellaneous costs being only five dollars, the thirty-five dollar monthly cost per site still is difficult to conceive making even that much from the poor results experienced so far. Only time will tell whether the effort will be worthwhile.

I am already changing my html sites so they will be easier and faster to add the new articles. Unfortunately that may cause me to effectively start over with my AdSense earnings since the links will be different and any pages already indexed will have to be re-indexed again since I am changing the sites little by little to php sites. I did something similar several months ago to a single larger site and even months later over 500 of those original pages were still indexed even though they had been off the site for many months.

5 Ways To Improve Your Adsense Earnings

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.

The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the WebPages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.