Once more, subscribing to feeds shows that it is a great way to keep up to date on ‘new developments’. On the official Adsense blog a few days ago a post appeared on placing ads near parts where users are expected to click:

Generally, we ask that you not place your ads near features of your site that your users may interact with by clicking.

Ouch! That will hurt a lot of web site owners who are using Adsense to earn a little money. Or will it?

In my opinion, the post on the official Adsense Blog is a bit cynical, because on the Adsense web site Google advises to ‘blend your ads into the style of your web site’, or with other words: make the ads look like a part of your site using the same colors, fonts and link style, so users do not even see that they are ads and will click on them expecting to go to another part of your site. As Google states it:

For most color techniques, we recommend using colors for your ad text and links that already exist on your site. For example, if the links on your site are all green and your text is black, use green links and black text in your ads as well. Since most users are accustomed to seeing blue links, you might also try using blue.

And what other than being fake menu’s are the so-called ‘link units‘? They are designed to look like a menu, allthough of course Google will never mention this in such a direct way. And my personal guess is that they deliver the highest CTR of all available ad formats.

Another interesting fact is that until the time of this writing Google themselves places ads directly below menu items. For example on the Discussion Groups help pages. And thousands of other sites are doing the same thing. So yes, they are stating it. And officially it is not allowed. But I think that the chance for being banned is very small for the time being.

I would be very interested to know if you know of someone being already banned because of this rule?