Hello DP members, I need your point of view about this article from Inside Adsense blog "Another look at optimizations" Maybe I don t understand properly, and I don t know if this is a suggestion a new guideline or a warning I remember time ago, google encourage publishers to optimize adsense ads blending with content, now looks like Google says not to blend google ads with content What do you think? regards
You are allowed to blend the ads to the extent that the users can distinguish between the ads and content. You can see what I mean from the example they give, the content looks exactly the same as the ads. Peace,
You may blend as long as a user can distinguish between the ads and content. I have great results using standard google colors.
What would you call this kind of blending? http://www.tech2.com/# ~~ The above is a very popular technology site. Now imo the ads are highly blended that makes them impossible to distinguish from the main content. For example the rectangle ads even have the side borders to make them part of the border at the top content area (See screenshot) Isn't this against the TOS now?
wow what a great work of bending! In my opinion this is against the spirit of the new guideline (see first post) even I did make click by accident regards
i did some research on the site and it seems they are a premium adsense publisher. However to bend the rules so much for them still doesn't make much sense. The fact is that end user does not know he is clicking an ad, thats the level of blending. That should be against the rules.
One of these days i saw this sam post in Inside Adsense blog, and at the bottom was a link for a blog that... well, those guys are breaking alot of rules Go figure Google is giving them traffic. lol
Ouch, that tech2.com must surely be breaking the rules! "Ads by Google" is unclickable on Opera, and there is no tool-tip for the URLs, nor does right-click give me the usual URL menu, so they must be cheating with layers or JavaScript. I don't mind that premium publishers get more control over layout and design, but when they are blatantly allowed to do things that would get most average publishers banned, I get rather angry!
As long as you aren't editing the ad code you should be okay. They give you color choices specifically to blend the ads into your site. As long as the "Ads by Google" tag is displayed (and it always is) people will know they are ads.
lol forget opera, its not possible in FF also. Thats why i had noticed it in the first place. If you look at another premium publisher of adsense http://in.indiatimes.com/ You can see in that case the "Ads By Google" can clearly be clicked. And it has a border at top and bottom. Sad part is you can't even report this site and ask google how did they manage to do what they have done. However i noticed that other sites in their network have the same unclickable "Ads by Google" link (http://www.ibnlive.com/) but atleast the clearly distinguish the ads by colours or background choice.
that guideline was mainly targeted at, making the other out going links look different than google ads! I guess making the titles of the ads in other color rather than the website's text or link color will be a good idea! Am sure that site must be a premium adsense publisher! their rules are a bit different than the rest of us!
that might well be the case but imo whats bad and a wrong practice for the rest of us should be wrong for the premium publishers also. At the heart of it is the fact that people clicking such ads might well think it to be part of the site and not an ad. There is, in principle nothing wrong in that as the user wants to read that stuff and thats why he is cliking on that, but by google's own rules, its completely against the premise of over blending as the article on adsense blog mentioned.