JenSense has a nice compilation of the changes that AdSense has made to it’s policies today.
There are quite a few but the ones that caught my eye are:
Referrals – you could previously have four referrals products per page but could only link to each one once.
Now you can use up to two referrals links/buttons per referral product – I can see this being very useful!
Use of Images – they’ve now updated their policies to reflect what they’d previously announced – ie that you cannot use images next to ads.
Copyrighted Material – the policy now reads:
“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. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”
Great stuff for those of us who are getting our content scraped! Now how do we enforce it?
Competitive Ads and Services – this is a significant one that I know some publishers are going to have to make some changes with. They are tightening up on publishers who have ads on their sites which have ‘same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site.’
This means you need to be very careful about running ads that resemble AdSense ads on them – anywhere on your site.
The policy now states:
“Competitive Ads and Services 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.”
This means that if you are running YPN text ads on one part of your site and AdSense on another that have the same colour palettes you are in violation of this policy (or if you’re rotating AdSense and YPN ads as I know some publishers do).
Jen writes a helpful post on this change here. As she writes – you now need to ensure that your different types of ads don’t resemble each other (ie change colors, add borders etc).
While I understand why they’re doing this (it’s a defensive move against other ad networks) it is going to cause a lot of publishers time and work – especially as it is a sitewide thing.
I know of many publishers who run AdSense on one part of a site and YPN on other parts and who rotate ads – looks like they have some significant work to do in the next day or two to comply.
I’ve already heard from a number of publishers that if given the choice between AdSense and YPN that they’ll jump to YPN because of the less stringent requirements – this change has put one too many hoops to jump through in front of some publishers.
