Image next to Adsense - Google told me to stop!

I have been placing images above the horizontal ads with border around pictures. Recently, I received an email from Google asking me to stop doing that. This is what they said:

"Thanks for following up with us. As stated in our previous email, publishers may not use images to direct attention to the ads on their sites.

We kindly ask that you move or remove the images placed next to the Google ads on your site, or remove the ads from your site."

I know many people are using the image strategy. Has Google changed their policy or was everyone wrong and I was unlucky?

 

you have to have a border or something between the images and the ads.

 

I do have border around the images. Are you saying I need a boarder around the whole section of images and then have the ad at the bottom?

 

do you have a url we can see?

 

Hey everyone, re: pictures around google ads
I asked google to check this page for me, to make sure it was in their guidelines
http://www.your3dsource.com/freeanimations.html

They wrote back and said it was ok. Hopefully this guy at google knew what he was talking about? To the op: let us know the url and we'll tell you what we think.

 

I'm pretty sure they've never allowed this, but they let a lot of the less extreme examples slip through the cracks. YPN really cracks down on it though.

 

google hasn't had any issue with images next to ads for the longest time. It's just recently that they started asking people to place borders and such between the iamges and the ads.

 

i was under the impression that this was allowed... i even had this on a site of mine... i recall an earlier threa discussing this topic...

 

it's always been allowed, you just can't place images next to the ads that draw too much attention (aarows pointing to the ad and such). I've had it running on some of my sites for over a year.

 

I've already removed all the images from the site that Google was referring to. I know about the borders. Just wanted to see if other people are getting this kind of warning.

 

without seeing how you had the images setup it's impossible for us to tell you if it was ok or not.

 

Here's another site with pretty much the same image layout. I am pretty sure this is ok as Google hasn't said anything yet, but it's very similiar to the site I had.

URL removed

 

But there are so many sites with this kind of layouts..

 

while there is a border around the image itself, the problem lies in that there is no defining line between the ad and the image. A horizontal line between the images and the ad would likely be all that is needed to make google happy.

Something like the following change

 

Thanks for the help! I'll definitely be applying that tonight.

 

It's worked for me for the past year or so. Google just wants a distinction between images and ads.

 

put say a faint border or a faint horisontal rule between them etc That is classed as 'distinguished' enough to my knowlage

 

That "before/After" site has more than one breach of TOS in it.

Just put a light border around your ads. I spoke with my account rep and she said mine was ok if I used a border on the ads of #EEEEEE

 

I know, I just wanted to point out where the image violation would likely be.

 

no worries. I guess I should have read the post instead of jumping to the image.

There are quite a few with that and I think it sources from some bad wording in a tutorial, where people have said a border around the images. When it should be "Between" the images and the ads.