I finally conjured up the time to read through the new Google AdSense Policy, which was updated a week back or so. JenSense has the best write-up about the various changes that Google has added to their policy. I’ll be blogging about the changes that I’ve noticed with the policy.

Almost every AdSense publisher has heard of the grayhat area of placing images next to advertisements, which increases the CTR (click-through rate) dramatically. Well this is now banned by Google:

May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks May not place misleading images alongside individual ads

Also, scraping websites which contain content not legally owned by them, usually aggregators is also banned by Google AdSense:

Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content.

They have also changed the amount of advertisements/referral buttons that you’re allowed to place:

• Up to three ad units may be displayed on each page.
• A maximum of two Google AdSense for search boxes may be placed on a page.
• A single link unit may also be placed on each page.
• Up to two referral units from each referral product or offering may be displayed on a page, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above.
• AdSense for search results pages may show only a single ad link unit in addition to the ads Google serves with the search results. No other ads may be displayed on your search results page.

Also, even though AdSense now allows other contextual networks, Google AdSense strictly forbids any other advertisements (contextual or not) to resemble the AdSense boxes on their page:

In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

However, Yahoo! still doesn’t allow their publishers to display other contextual advertisements on pages running YPN (Yahoo! Publisher Network). So Google really doesn’t have much competition to worry about at the moment.

There were a couple extra changes which were added/removed, so I would suggest reading JenSense’s analysis.

Technorati Tags: Google, AdSense, grayhat, CTR, scraping, aggregators, copyright, referral, contextual, Yahoo, publisher, YPN, JenSense

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