Join our policy refreshers

To help you better understand our program policies, we’re holding a number of policy refreshers online over the coming weeks. In these sessions, we’ll take a closer look at some of the policies we’re asked most about and share some tips on how to stay compliant.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll review how you can keep your content compliant with an emphasis on:

• User generated content
• Copyrighted content 

Check out our full listing of recently recorded sessions as well as the schedule for upcoming sessions - and don’t forget to register.

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Specialist
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Stay on top of AdSense program policies with new notifications in your account

Our AdSense program policies are defined to ensure we all preserve a healthy ecosystem for users, advertisers and other publishers, and compliance with these policies is an absolute must for every publisher. We’ve heard your requests for more accessible information on policy issues and we’re happy to tell you that we are launching an additional policy notifications feature directly in your AdSense account. This will help you to quickly understand and address any potential policy issues.

Going forward, if our system detects a policy violation, you’ll receive both an email and an account notification with a link to view more details. Under the Policy violations section on the home tab, you can quickly access important information including details on each violation, the issue ID and an example of the violation on your site. The page will also include details on the action you need to take to resolve the violation.

We’ll be gradually rolling out this new feature over the coming weeks to all publisher accounts.  We hope that it helps you quickly identify and resolve any potential issues so you can focus on growing your business with AdSense. Please remember that as before, you'll need to ensure all of your sites comply with our policies. In addition to checking your account for any notifications, be sure to regularly review your sites for compliance with our policies.

Thanks for your continued feedback and suggestions on how we can continue improving AdSense for you. Please continue to share them on our AdSense +page and if you’d like more details on this new feature, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
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Policy refresher: Appeals process

We’re continuing our policy refresher series today, taking a closer look at what happens when we detect content that doesn’t comply with our policies.

As we've talked about often on this blog we maintain a set of policies for AdSense designed to foster a healthy ecosystem and protect our publishers, advertisers and users. The vast majority of content on AdSense publisher sites follows these policies. However, sometimes, our systems do find content that doesn't comply, in which case we'll send a notice to the affected publisher. Notifications can be viewed by signing in to your AdSense account and visiting the Messages page, under your Home tab. Additionally, notifications are sent to the email address associated with your AdSense account. A notification will outline whether it is a site warning/disabling or an account disabling issue. If it is a site warning then you have 72 hours to make changes and do not need to contact us. If your account has been disabled then you should review this help center article to find out more about why we would disable an entire account. The rest of this post will deal with what to do if you receive a site disabling notification.

The first step is to understand the nature of the violation. For more about the different causes and how we define them, you can visit our Help Center and review our program policies.

In some cases, you may be eligible to appeal. If this is the case, please take note of the following considerations in formulating your appeal:

• Make sure you understand the violation: each time we send a notification we include a snippet explaining the violation. If you still have questions following this, our Help Center contains a variety of information on program policies. We also encourage you to seek advice in our Forum - our Top Contributors have a lot of policy knowledge.
• Check your entire site: with each notification we send you a URL as an example of the violation. Keep in mind that this is only an example, the violation may be present on other pages on your site, and we expect you to take appropriate action throughout your entire site. In many cases publishers have found Google’s search operators, specifically the “site:” operator, to come in handy, particularly for content violations.
• Be thorough: we understand that AdSense means a lot to you, and having ad serving disabled may cost you revenue. Take your time when filing your appeal and look through your entire site. Writing a thorough appeal is more important than filing an appeal quickly.
• Tell us how you ensure that this won't happen again: if you were notified about a content violation, tell us what systems you have put in place to ensure that content violating our program policies won't be placed alongside AdSense ads again. Webmasters with large websites might talk about updating filters or hiring human reviewers, while blog owners may tell us that they have familiarized themselves with our adult content policy better, and ensure not to post certain type pictures again.
• Send us examples: were you notified for content violations? In that case send us some example URLs where you removed AdSense ads from. Were you notified because of ad implementation issues? Send us an example URL with your improved implementation - for some cases we will require pages with AdSense ad code implemented, even though ad serving is disabled.
• Err on the side of caution: you may disagree with our decision to disable ad serving to your site, but keep in mind that our policies exist to protect the entire network of users, advertisers and publishers.

We know that your sites are important to you. Please understand that we don't take these decisions lightly. For more information on appeals best practices, take a look at this help center article.

Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Team
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Policy refresher: family-safe content

For our next installment of our policy refresher series, we’re talking about a topic we’re frequently asked about...adult content and keeping AdSense family-safe.

We’ve made a commitment to our users, advertisers and publishers to keep the AdSense network family-safe.  A general rule of thumb when it comes to the adult content policy is: if you wouldn’t want to share this content at a family dinner or view it in your boss’s office, you shouldn’t place AdSense code on it.

Let’s take a closer look at our adult content policy:



Still have questions? Don’t forget that we’ll be hosting a number of Hangouts on Air as part of our policy refreshers series.

Check the schedule below to sign up for our Hangout on Air about adult content.

View our Hangouts schedule

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Team
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Updates to our ‘Modifying Ad Code’ Policy

Web trends and technology demand that your site evolves quickly to maintain a growing user base. We’ve heard your questions and feedback on areas like responsive design, and we’re happy to let you know that we’ve updated our existing guidelines around modifying the AdSense ad code. We hope that this increased flexibility will help you continue enhancing the user experience on your site.

Going forward, we will permit publishers to make modifications to the AdSense ad code so long as those modifications do not artificially inflate ad performance or harm advertisers and otherwise comply with our Terms and Conditions and program policies. This will enable you to try a range of techniques on your site such as:

• Responsive design: Enabling publishers to create a single webpage that will adapt to the device on which it’s being viewed, whether it’s a laptop, smartphone or tablet, to maximize user experience.
• A/B testing: Running a test by creating multiple versions of a page, comparing user behavior to see which page is the most effective.
• Setting custom channels dynamically: Tracking performance of segments of users, sections of your site, or other behavior to maximize ad and user experience.
• Ad tag minification: Enabling your site pages to load faster by reducing the amount of data to be transferred.

For more details and to find the specific code snippets related to the bullets above, visit our updated Help Center article.

Even with this new flexibility, it’s important to proceed with caution to ensure the ecosystem remains balanced for publishers, users and advertisers. Please note that publishers must not make modifications to the AdSense code if those modifications are not permitted by our program policies. Publishers should always use caution when modifying the AdSense code and must not use techniques like hiding ad units, implementing the AdSense code in a way that covers content, creating ‘floating ads’, or manipulating ad targeting as they are a violation of our policies. More information about these types of prohibited techniques can be found in our updated Help Center article. In addition, please be aware that some types of code modification may prevent ads from appearing correctly, which may negatively impact your revenue.

We also look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions on our AdSense +page.

Posted By Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager
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Join our Policy Refreshers

In order to help you better understand our policies, we’ll be holding a series of policy refreshers online in the coming weeks. We’ll discuss the policies we’re asked about most, explain how we enforce them and share tips on how to stay compliant.

In this series, we’ll review:

• Our general policies
• How to keep your content family- safe
• How to ensure your ad placements are policy compliant 

Check the schedule below to sign up for our Hangouts on Air, and look out for more blog posts on AdSense policies in the coming weeks.

View our Hangouts schedule

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Specialist
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Coming soon: Updates to our Terms and Conditions

In order to keep pace with changes in our products, we regularly review our Terms and Conditions to make sure they're up to date and in line with those of other Google products. As a result of our recent review, we’ll be making some updates to our Terms, starting April 23rd. If you're based in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or North America, you'll see a notification in your account when you log in after this date. It will present you with the updated Terms and prompt you to accept them. For publishers based in the Asia-Pacific region, the change to our Terms will happen slightly later as we’re rolling the changes out gradually across all regions. 

You'll have 30 days to fully review the new terms in detail before action is required. Before the updated Terms appear in your account, we'd like to give you an idea of what's changing:

• With this new version of the Terms and Conditions, our goal has been to make them as clear and transparent as possible. As a result of this, we hope that it’ll be even easier to navigate and find what you’re looking for.
• With mobile being one of the big trends in 2013 and beyond, we’re expanding our Terms to cover mobile properties more specifically. We’ve also incorporated guidelines for using the AdMob SDK and other publisher products.

The updates outlined above are the main areas that will be affected by the change. However, we’ve made smaller changes throughout, so please be sure to review the Terms as a whole before accepting them.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager

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Guidelines for monetizing Flash gaming sites

Playing online games is a common pastime, and many of you implement Flash games on your site to capture your users’ interests. We've received some questions about our policies related to Flash games in the past, so we've posted a couple messages, including Using the right product and Tips for placing ads on game play pages which provide tips on how ads should be implemented. Today we’re talking about content issues on Flash gaming sites as well as common ad implementation violations for Flash gaming sites.

Family safe content
You can monetize Flash games, however our policies do not permit monetizing games with sexual or violent content. It's also important to refrain from including or allowing any explicit or profane language in descriptions or comments.

Distance between ads and game
To reduce the risk of invalid click activity, avoid placing AdSense for content ads too close to the Flash game. We strongly recommend a distance of at least 150 pixels between the ads and the the edge of a game. When users are concentrating on a Flash game and clicking frantically, invalid clicks can occur. Since each game and site is unique, some games may require a greater distance based on the type of game and how it is played. To know whether a game is likely to cause invalid clicks, we recommend that you play your Flash game, placing yourself in the user’s shoes, before placing ads on the page. Clicks on ads should always be motivated by user interest, and not by the placement of the ads on the page.

AFC as pre-roll
AdSense for games (AFG) is a product designed specifically for the monetization of Flash games. Using AdSense for content (AFC) ads as a pre-roll before, or mid-roll during a Flash game, is against our policies, as the product was not created for this kind of an implementation. If you wish to use Google ads as a pre-roll to your game, please apply for AFG. For more information about AFG, please visit our Help Center.

In order for users to enjoy the gaming experience of your site, the Flash game should be the primary focus of the page. Always keep the user in mind when placing ads and your site should remain in good standing from a policy perspective.

Posted by Ben Barkhoff,  AdSense Policy Team
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Updates around usage of 300x600 ad format

Since our recent introduction of the new 300x600 ad format, we’ve been happy to see many publishers testing it out on their pages. After carefully reviewing this ad format, we’d like to let you know about an upcoming update to our policies around use of the 300x600 unit.

Because this new format is larger than all our other ad units, we want to help ensure a balance between content and ads across publisher sites. With this in mind, going forward, publishers will be permitted to place a maximum of one 300x600 ad unit on each page. If you’ve placed more than one 300x600 ad unit per page on your site, we ask that you remove any additional ad units by Jan 10, 2013. We’ll also be sending email notifications shortly to affected publishers, asking them to make this update.

Please note that the limit for AdSense for content ad units still remains at three per page, so it’ll be possible to place one 300x600 ad unit and up to two other sizes on a page. As always, it’s important to consider both the user and advertiser experiences when placing any additional ad units on your pages.

We appreciate your understanding and help as we make this update. Thanks again for all of your feedback and enthusiasm for this new ad format; we’re continuing to work on developing new sizes, and will keep you posted on any new developments. If you’d like more information about AdSense policies, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Charles Huang, Policy Associate

Working better together: Protecting against invalid activity

Publishers are the lifeblood of the Internet, and we’re committed to helping you grow your businesses. Last year alone, we shared $6.5 billion with our AdSense publishers. We also invest immense amounts of time and millions of dollars in systems (including sophisticated algorithms and human reviews) that keep bad ads from appearing on your sites and prevent advertisers from being fraudulently charged for bad clicks. When everything is working well, advertisers trust our network and continue to invest in it, which generates revenue for you the publisher, ultimately funding the free content users love.

But we’ve also heard the stories: publishers finding their accounts suspended or even disabled for “invalid activity” without a clear understanding of why or how to fix it. We know this can be an intensely frustrating, even scary experience. So why does this happen?

While the vast majority of publishers who sign up for AdSense do so in good faith, unfortunately there are some bad actors out there.  As you can imagine, we can’t reveal all the tools we use to keep bad sites and bad traffic out of our network.  But sometimes these tools result in good publishers who become a source of invalid activity having their accounts disabled without much recourse.  We’re making some changes we think will help fix this:

• We are considering tenure more actively when responding to detected invalid activity. For example, some trusted publishers will now have their accounts suspended instead of terminated, and over time we hope to work directly with more publishers to resolve invalid traffic issues without needing to disable the account at all. (As always, we’ll continue to credit advertisers for any invalid activity.)
• We’ve given publishers tools to submit more informative appeals via a new form, which may help resolve issues more quickly.
• We’re providing more details on invalid activity’s causes. If we’ve detected a violation of our policies you’ll receive an email and a notification to your account with further information and instructions. And you can read all about the causes of invalid activity at our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, which is now available in most languages supported by AdSense, such as German, French, Polish and Arabic.
• Whether you’re looking for a refresher or just creating your first ad unit, you can review the do’s and don'ts of ad traffic in our expanded AdSense Academy. 
• In order to help publishers avoid common pitfalls, we’re kicking off a video series that explains why some of our policies exist and how you can make sure you’re working with them. Our first looks specifically at invalid traffic.

We want to work with our publisher partners to keep the AdSense network strong -- keeping good publishers’ accounts in good standing, while also protecting advertisers and users from fraudulent activity. This is why we’re making changes, like the ones discussed today, to provide more help when things go wrong. We’ll be making even more changes as the year goes on so look for continued updates on this blog.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack - Product Management Director

We want to hear from you. Let’s continue the conversation -- submit your questions to us about the topics discussed in this post via Google Moderator. We’ll be holding a Google Hangout in January with members of our Product Quality Operations team for the first time to address your questions. Please note that for privacy reasons, we won’t be able to respond to account-specific questions.

Updates to the application process for host partner sites

We’ll soon be updating the application process for new publishers who apply for an AdSense account via a host partner site like Blogger or Hubpages. As you may know, host partner sites allow publishers to create and monetize their content, which is hosted on the partner site rather than the publisher’s own domain. New publishers approved for AdSense accounts via a host partner site will be able to place ads on and earn from policy-compliant content they’ve created on any host partner site. If they then decide to show ads on their own domain, from today onwards they’ll need to complete an extra approval step similar to the application process at www.google.com/adsense. Please note that publishers who were approved for AdSense accounts before today won't be affected by these changes.

Here’s an example to explain the process -- let’s say Sue runs a blog using Blogger. She applies for a hosted AdSense account within Blogger, and once approved, she begins to monetize her blog. If she then launches a second blog on Blogger, she’ll be able to show ads on that second blog and earn from both sites.

Next, let’s imagine Sue decides to purchase her own domain, example.com, and wants to earn from the content she creates there. Before she can do so, she’ll need to complete a form in her account to request a site review. After submitting the form, she’ll need to generate ad code and implement it on a live page of example.com that receives traffic. The implemented ad unit will remain blank until the domain has been reviewed by the AdSense team.

If the request is approved, Sue can proceed with placing additional ad units on the site. If the request is denied, she’ll be unable to show ads on her new domain, but there’ll be no impact to her two existing blogs; she can continue to earn from them, and can also work to resolve the issues with her new domain and resubmit her site for review.

These changes will help ensure a consistent, seamless sign up experience for publishers, whichever application process they follow, while also allowing publishers and host partner sites to continue working together as they have been. We remain committed to building a high-quality network that also provides strong business results for our advertiser partners and a positive experience for users.

Posted by Sophia Lin, Product Manager

Tips for creating high quality sites part 2

The goal of the Google Display Network is to provide valuable and relevant content for our users and advertisers. We’ve previously provided some tips for creating high quality sites for AdSense. To build on that, we’d like to share some more information about which types of sites and pages are best suited for monetization.

Pages should provide originality and added value
The Google Webmaster Guidelines highlight the importance of providing original content that sets your site apart, but this is only one component of creating a high quality website. Our guidelines also recommend, for example, that you do not use doorway pages and doorway domains, pages with little to no content, or pages optimized for specific keywords or phrases.

Strive for well-organized and information-rich content
Providing original content is only one component of creating a high quality website. The content should also be informative and organized in a manner that is easy for users to navigate.

Here is a short - but not exhaustive - list of things you may want to keep in mind:

• Focus on topics you’re knowledgeable and enthusiastic about.
• Avoid duplicating the same content on several pages or producing overlapping or redundant content.
• Focus on engaging the user (i.e., providing an interactive experience with relevant information based on user interests) rather than generating content in the attempt to trick our bots, for instance with irrelevant high-paying keywords.

The organization and navigational structure of your site are also important, as users should be able to easily navigate through your pages and find the information or service they’re seeking. In addition, there should always be a good balance between the ad implementation and the content of your page. Ads should be an additional resource for users, enriching the value of the page and not be overwhelming or more prominent than the content itself.

Avoid placing ads on non-content-based pages
Sometimes websites that provide valuable content as a whole may have certain sections or pages that are not well-suited for monetization. This includes pages that users visit before potentially exiting a domain, such as a page where users are shown a “thank you” message for their visit or purchase. Another example are 404 error pages where users are informed there is no content to be found at that given URL.

We hope you found this helpful. For more information about creating high quality content, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines, AdSense Program policies and the policy section of the AdSense Help Center.

Our best suggestion is to follow what we at Google still maintain as our core principle: “Focus on the users and all else will follow.”

Posted by Francesco Angeli, AdSense Policy team

Policy Tips: Avoiding Copyright Infringement

One of the fantastic benefits of the Internet is that it puts incredible information and entertainment at our fingertips. We can instantly watch videos, listen to music, read news articles and much more. It’s important to remember, however, that these works may be protected by copyright law.

We’d like to take a moment to explain the AdSense policies regarding copyrighted material and provide some tips on how to comply with them.

AdSense policy
It’s against our policies to show ads alongside copyrighted material you don’t have authorization to use. Simply put, you cannot run AdSense ads alongside copyrighted content that violates copyright laws, or alongside links to such content. The program policies go into more detail.

What’s copyrighted?
Generally speaking, any original creative work that appears online is protected by copyright law. There are some exceptions, such as purely factual material, or material that has entered the public domain. But in general the reach of copyright law is very broad.

Do you have the right to use the material?
In most cases, without a specific license or exception, you don’t have the right to offer most mainstream entertainment such as television shows, movies, and popular music on your website.

If you created the content entirely from scratch, chances are you hold the copyright. Generally, you’re free to monetize this kind of content any way you like. If you didn’t create the content, or you created it using other peoples’ content as source material, you should ask yourself if you have a license or if an exception applies.

You may have acquired permission from the copyright holder for the material on your web site. This kind of permission is typically called a license. In this case, as long as your use is in line with the license you have, you should be okay.

There are also exceptions to copyright law that may apply to your use. Fair use in the United States, and other similar exceptions elsewhere, allow for certain kinds of uses of copyrighted material. Common examples are criticism or scholarship. There are other exceptions to copyright law as well.

We don’t want AdSense used in ways that may support copyright violations, so we sometimes err on the side of caution if a site cannot demonstrate a clear legal basis for using or linking to copyrighted material.

Linking to filesharing hosts
It’s against our policies to show ads on the same page as links to other sites that are hosting copyrighted materials without authorization. Keep in mind that these sites come in various forms such as forums, blogs or community websites.

Reporting instances of copyright infringement
If you believe that a site which is participating in the AdSense program is displaying your copyrighted material without the rights to do so, please report it using this form or by clicking on the AdChoices icon. If you’d like to know more information about copyright issues and AdSense, we encourage you to visit our Help Center.

Posted by Ben Barkhoff,  AdSense Policy Team

Tips for creating high quality sites

We receive a lot of questions from publishers wanting to know best practices to grow your businesses with AdSense. While there's no one right answer, our advice continues to be to focus on creating high quality content and delivering the best possible user experience on your websites. Here are some key suggestions on how to design and organize your website content with an overall emphasis on the quality of the site.

Don't create multiple pages or sites with duplicate content.

We encourage you to create high quality sites rather than a large quantity of sites. Focusing on one site and making it richer in information and authentic in content not only benefits users, but also helps you win more of them. When users are browsing online, they want to find what they're looking for quickly and easily without combing through endless multiple pages, subdomains, or sites with substantially generic or duplicate content. If you have pages or sites that are similar in content or template design, consider consolidating the pages or sites into one.

 

Provide content that gives users a reason to visit, and return, to your site. 

When you create content on your site, it’s important to ask yourself if the page provides substantial value or service when compared to sites covering similar subjects. It's worth the effort to create original content that sets your site apart from the rest. This will provide useful search results and keep your visitors coming back.
 

Provide the information or service promised. 

Some publishers create sites that appear to offer a product or service, but instead trick users into navigating through several pages and viewing ads. This results in a negative user experience, and causes your site to be perceived as untrustworthy. Use keywords appropriately and in context with your content and make sure users are able to easily navigate through the site to find what products, goods, or services are promised.

There’s no shortcut to success. Building high quality site takes effort and time. However, we’ve seen that publishers who focus on their users instead of using quick and deceptive techniques are the real winners and experience long-term revenue growth and success in our network. For more information, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines and the policy section of the AdSense Help Center.

Posted by Lingjuan Zhang, AdSense Policy team

Avoiding accidental clicks Pt. 3: Tips for placing ads on game play pages

Today we’re sharing our tips and best practices for placing AdSense for content ads on game play pages in a way that doesn’t confuse the user and create invalid click activity. If you run a site with online games, a game play page refers to the page where an individual game is described and a user can click to begin playing. Make sure to also visit Pt. 1: Keeping the right distance and Pt. 2: Use the right product for more tips on avoiding invalid clicks and maintaining a healthy user experience.

Let’s start with a quick recap on why it’s important to follow these policies to minimize accidental clicks. First off, in order to protect our network from artificially inflated costs, we carefully monitor clicks and impressions on Google ads. Invalid activity that we detect will be deducted from revenue at the end of the month and in some cases, may eventually lead to a disabled account in which the earnings will be returned to the affected advertisers. Also, with smart pricing, high numbers of accidental clicks will decrease publisher revenue in the long-run. This is because accidental clicks don’t result in conversions for advertisers, which will in turn reduce the amount that they’re willing to pay to show ads on your site.

As a general guideline for online gaming sites, you can ask yourself the following question: Could a user who doesn’t speak the language of your page navigate from the game play description page to the actual game, with a minimal chance of unintentionally clicking on advertisements? The answer should be yes, and based on this, we’ve derived the following two tips:

• Interstitial ad pages: Game play buttons shouldn’t lead to interstitial pages dominated by AdSense for content ad units with no obvious game play links. More generally, links intended to navigate the user to game play pages shouldn’t deceive the user into clicking AdSense ads. Please visit our Help Center for more information on placing AdSense ads on interstitial pages.

• Inconspicuous play buttons: Game play buttons should be clickable and placed in an obvious location. To minimize user confusion, indicate how to play the game through text and image. Ad units shouldn’t surround game play links too closely. Please visit our Help Center to view the full policy regarding deceptive AdSense implementation.

              An example of acceptable implementation                        An example of unacceptable implementation

For a full description of the above two policies and to review example ad implementations, please visit our Help Center. Following these guidelines will help you avoid accidental clicks and provide an optimal user experience.

Posted by Awni Hannun - Inside AdSense 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.

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