Irrelevant content - is it a TOS violation?

I couldn't find anything on this, so thought I would come to the best source for such answers

If you have a popular web forum about a keyword that isn't high-paying, can you include somewhere on every page some text about a higher-paying keyword, even if it doesn't seem relevant to your forum?

For example, say your forum is about Rubik's cubes. Could you include at the bottom of every page of your forum text like this:

Canadian Pharmacies - Recently the FDA has begun to allow the importation of low priced generic pharmaceuticals from Canada. Canadian drugs are particularly inexpensive for two reasons, as major news sources have reported: Shorter Canadian patent times allow for quicker production of generic alternatives. Canada has generic drug versions that don't even exist in the United States. Read more here

In a sense it's like an ad to a page that will have more information about "Canadian Pharmacies", so it's legitimate. But it's also in the source code of your forums so you may get Canadian Pharmacy ads (meaning higher paying ads) on your Rubik's Cube pages.

I'm not looking to do anything that isn't in good standing with Google... I just don't know if this is a violation or not.

 

Yeah, but if your site is on Rubik's Cube (as an example) and your visitors go to you for Rubik's Cube talk, why in the world would they click on an ad for pharmaceuticals (as an example)? What you're considering doesn't just NOT make sense, but it won't convert. If you want to attract high-paying keywords, build a site for them. Doesn't that make more sense?

 

Thanks for the reply Jack.

My example above is probably not a good one. Instead of Canadian pharmacies, maybe make it about something that would still be higher-paying, but perhaps be better suited for the audience. Maybe video games, etc.

I understand your points though. My main question is whether or not this is a TOS violation -- can you place content on there that is out of place, but could intentionally drive ads towards those keywords?

 

It's not a violation. It's your site, so you can basically put whatever type of content you want on it. If you want to mix it up, you can do that, too. It's just like a blog -- filled with all kinds of disparate info.

 

that about sums up.

 

CD55: There is some key info in Jack's post you might miss. Mixing up content is not a violation. If you post about misc. info, you will get misc. ads. Misc ad's do not generate as many referrals (clicks) as targetted ads.

Traffic arrives based on the primary content of your page. IMO, you are better off serving ads related to the content of your page.

Chasing the cost per click outside of the theme of your site is a total waste of time.

 

Thanks for your replies -- extremely helpful. I will probably have to look in to developing additional sites instead, but I'm happy to learn it is not a violation of the TOS.

Thanks again ... I'm enjoying the expertise and helpful info about AdSense found on this forum.

 

so why then people dont put mesothelioma ads on their sites?

 

Go buy one of the 10,000 cookie cutter, made-for-adsense (MFA) mesothelioma sites on ebay and let me know how this works out for you.

 

Whose stopping you?

 

irrelevant content is no different than google serving up mfa ads on your site... it's a two-way street.

the publisher needs to provide focused content, and google needs to provide focused adsense ads.

 

Thanks all for the replies. Much obliged. This is a great forum to get help on AdSense.

Since trying this out a few days ago, my AdSense revenue has more than doubled. It is too early to tell long-term how it will work.

I have a very high-traffic forum, but one of the big problems I was having was getting a lot of low-paying ads on forum pages where Google could not come up with a highly-relevant ad. Putting this type of content (about a high-paying keyword) at the bottom of each forum page has made it so ads relevant to the high-paying keyword come up in cases where Google doesn't specifically target something from the forum post content.

My concern was primarily whether this was a TOS violation or not, but your responses were helpful. I didn't know if AdWords advertisers, say for example about "Canadian Pharmacies", had a legal reason to complain seeing that click-throughs happened on my pages but that the only reason their ad was served there was because of the randomly placed (and seemingly irrelevant) text about the pharmacies.

Thank you again,
CD55