This is not to address the legality of such an act but as a potential viewer of your site, if I read that I would think what a scammer and be out of there. Think that would be an extremely bad pr move even if you were not trying to receive payment for such a download.
We all remember the days when just about every other site had that stupid netscape button or banner. And how it said to download netscape at once to get the best damn browser on the net. Now people want to put firefox on their sites and tell people to download??? That is a sure fire way to scare visitors away. PS,,,,,,stricly ms here, aint going the firefox routine EVER again!
logically , google wants us to promote firefox, and asking visitors to download it is promoting exept if google want us to let people to use it or not and to be truthfull , i had several times enough of firefox crazy moves and i lost my bookmarks more than 3-4 times i do not think that firefox would survive if it wasn't google who's supporting it and with such incidents all over the net do you think a visitor would download it if you don't take him by the hand and tell him do it ?????????????????????? anyway i am concerned with the legality is it legal???
The referral buttons are to be treated like the ads. That means no overt promotion of it. No arrows pointing to it. No "asking" your visitors to download it.
If you don't believe us go ahead and do what you want. It's no skin off our nose if you're banned. /shrug
it's not a matter that i do not believe you , it is a matter of finding the text i know that google team are not stupid to ask for such an illogical demand for ads it's normal but for firefox it's completly another objective when i downloaded my firefox it was because a website was saying download it bla bla bla if they weren't asking i wouldn't have had the idea of downloading it
IE is so out of date my friend, 80% of the internet still use's it, but it's horrible for viewing the new up to date websites (css etc.).
You asked us if you are aloud to tell visitors to click your ads, we give you an answer, then you tell us basically you wanna hear it straight from google's mouth? lol.
is it legal...? http://www.freegooglesoftware.com/index.php http://www.freegooglesoftware.com/Google-Desktop/ http://www.freegooglesoftware.com/Google-Toolbar/ http://www.freegooglesoftware.com/Picasa/
since 75% of my earnings come from FF referrals, and i wanted to make it even MORE, i asked this same questions - but i asked Adsense support. The basic respose: NO YOU CANNOT. the legalese is in the TOS - (i'm paraphrasing) - a) You cannot induce, prompt, etc, users to click ads. b) Referrals are treated the same as ads
It's funny. Noobs come here to ask if they can do this or that, but when we give them an answer they don't like, they demand we give them proof. It's like, "Duh, then why did you come here to ask in the first place?"
Yeah, the noobs just want us to say, you can do this, it is okay, google won't ban you. Am thinking, when in the future a noob comes in and wants to know if it is okay to cheat google in some way, we all jump in and say "hell yes". If only people would actually read the adsense TOS, the one that says do you agree when you get an account.
I think it's obvious the reason why they react so negatively when you tell them they can't do something -- it's because they're already doing it.
Why just go and read by yourself? Their policies tell that One phrash "Referral buttons are considered to be ‘Google ads’ for purposes of these program policies." Another phrash said "Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads." So here is my opinion: only search box is not considered to be ‘Google ads’. You might ask them to search! wait... you can't ask them to click ads after search. LOL