Every morning, I log into my Google Adsense account to see how much money I made while I was sleeping, believe me this is an amazing feeling. But today, I got the totally opposite of this amazing feeling when I saw the Notification of a Policy Violation.
Google_AdsenseThis year (2016) is my 10th year with Google Adsense, and the fact that I got a policy violation alert in my account tells how risky business it is to rely entirely on Google Adsense.
Fortunately it was only a site based violation related to Ads placement. When I went through a few pages on Google Adsense policies and found the policy I was violation and I quickly fixed it.
What’s interesting to know is that I was violating it since last few years, literally. And I got the notification from Google Adsense team today. And I’ve seen same practised by many bloggers, both small and big, even today.
The key thing here to learn is that no matter what you see being practiced by other bloggers, it doesn’t have to be right.
Always make sure you go through the pages mentioned by Google Adsense team about the Ads policy and make educated decisions to place ads.
If I, who has been a Google Adsense account holder for over a decade, can get a policy violation alert, anybody can get. And those who are not getting it, might or might not get it in future, you cannot tell Google Adsense team that you were simply following what xyz blogger does, because 75% of people won’t be able to contact Google Adsense.
So, play safe, keep calm and read the Google Adsense policy page.
Maximum Number of Ads on a Webpage Allowed by Google Adsense
- Up to three AdSense for content units
- Up to three link units
- Up to two search boxes
This gives you a total of 8 Ads on a single webpage, but keep in mind that more ads do not mean more revenue. Also, the pages need to have so much content so that they Content: Ads ratio looks reasonable.
You can read all the point below to understand what kind of placements are allowed and what is not allowed.
What’s not allowed by Google Adsense.
I’ll simply highlight a few key things here, you can check out this page for the details.
Don’t Put Ads Under Labels other than ‘Sponsored Links’ and ‘Advertisements’ or ‘Ads’ , Labels such as ‘Recommended Link’ ‘Favourite Links’, ‘Our friends’ etc are not allowed as they trick users to think they are art of the website.
Don’t Put Ads under Menu Bar with Dropdown Menus. This increases the chances of accidental clicks when a user tries to click on the Sub-Menu from the dropdown.
Don’t Put Ads in Sticky Sidebars, when you scroll through a page, the Ad shouldn’t stay on the screen, even for 1px. Many these these days have Smart Sidebars which make it sticky. Either disable sticky sidebar or Don’t Put Google Ads in it.
Don’t Place ads under a misleading header, such as ‘Recommended’ ‘You might like these’ ‘Click the link below’. Basically anything that tricks users to click on Ads is against the Adsense policy.
Don’t Put Ads on
- Dynamic Content, such as Live Chats, Instant Messaging etc.
- Pages such as 404 error pages, thank you, login, logout pages, where there is no useful content.
- In Emails and Software Applications.
- In a Popup Window (Google does not even allows putting ads where more than 3 Popup Ads are used)
- Inside an iframe (when another website is framed into a website)
- Webpages that are set for Auto-Refresh after a certain interval of time.
What’s not allowed on Mobile Friendly Sites
Mostly all the bloggers these days use responsive design, and their blogs are Mobile Friendly, so this section is applicable to everyone.
Don’t put 300×250 or larger unit on the top as your first ad. Because it pushes the content below the fold (user has to scroll down to view the content). This is strictly against Google Adsense policy.
Don’t put Ads too close that two Ads appear on a the Mobile screen at the same time. You should place ads between some content, ideally it can be an image or some 150-200 word text.
