Hi all, I'm not 100% sure that this is the exact forum to post this thread, since I think that, as you'll see, the technical answer is clear. It's more a matter of "should" rather than "is". AdSense Ad Units provides a variety of ads that take up a fixed amount of space. You can move these around as the page is loading using JavaScript to account for a user's resolution, or shut them off completely for low-res. Using 2-step systems, you're welcome to have several ad layouts for the same page, depending on what resolution/browser/OS/Platform your user is viewing your website with, as long as you don't go over the allowed amount of "3 and 1". However, all this doesn't allow for spatial manipulation that you'd see in, say, vBulletin. Let's say you have the space for one out of the potentially 4 ads of a skyscraper (I know, there can appear anywhere from 1 to 4, but suppose we figured a way so that it'll always fill to 4, somehow), but you want to show the rest. This can be done in several ways. You can tell the user to "mouse-over here to expand", and the tower of links would expand as long as the mouse is over any of them, this is basic JS/CSS. Or maybe not that, maybe have them scroll slowly from top to bottom, or have horizontal links scroll from right to left, pausing at each one. Maybe you don't have much space, and only want to place a button saying "special offers", that, when someone mouse-overs, expands for a time to a rectangle ad unit. All the Google text will still appear on all of these devices, ie - "Ads by Google", "Advertise on this site", etc.. There's nothing that would in any way skew their purpose. And yet, I'm sure that no one who wants to keep using AdSense would dare try this. I mean, placing the ad on a div to align it to the right, that's fine. I mean yeah it's positioning, but it's like a background table, with a bit of JS so that is stays in the right spot from the middle of the page. But then, what if I cropped the div? I mean from below. I only want 3 ads, not 4... They're still ads, the user knows it, it says so on the top of the ad unit. So now it won't say "advertise on this site"... who cares? If I'm looking for advertisers, and I choose not to care, then why should anyone else? And what about that large rectangle? I mean, like they mentioned themselves, you can prepare several ad schemes for the same page right? So why not have one where the ad scheme changes dynamically? I want to place a link that expands the rectangle, and I'll make it clear to the user: "click here to view special offers". Then the rectangle would appear gradually. What's the difference between that and a pop-up? Actually I'm not being sarcastic at all with the last one, I'm honestly asking, would that be considered compliant? It's not misleading in any way, and the ad unit would appear several pixels away, so that no accidental clicks would occur. Somehow I can still guess what even the less strict AdSense users would say. Thoughts?
I tried to read your post, but I'm not going to lie, it killed my eyes after about two lines. I would suggest breaking it down into main points that are easier to read.