Hi guys, I'm planning a "secret" area on my forums (running phpBB) where only a few users would have acess to. The other areas remain public. The idea of this area is obvisouly not generate revenue, but discuss new ideas for the site. I'm afraid that it might violate the TOS, since I can't find a way to remove ads only from that specific area. Any thoughts or suggestions here? Thanks!
Wow, thanks for the replies!! I heard somewhere you couldn't have ads on private areas, it's always better to check first
Unless you let the Google mediabot though I think you'll get PSA's anyway - hang on I'll check on my forum... Actually no - you still get ads displaying... They don't look site targetted either (In terms of CPM or whatever) - if the Mediabot can't crawl those pages (because they aren't visible to the open public - and haven't ever been either), how can it serve ads to them? AdSenseAdvisor?
If your only question is will you get in trouble, then you probably have nothing to worry about. I searched around for opinions, and it seems there's nothing in the TOS, but just that Google doesn't support it, so you just wouldn't have any actual ads showing up behind the login. http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=10035 If you do want to allow ads behind a login, there are ways (for example, allowing the mediapartner bot to bypass the login - a security risk for sure), but it's recommended that you write to Google to ask if it's ok, because it's really only best if you have a large user base in your private forum.
If the AdSense crawler can't crawl the pages (either because they're in a protected area of the site or they're listed in the robots.txt file) then AdSense resorts to using ads related to the overall theme of the site. So if your site is completely about "blue widgets", you should see ads for "blue widgets". If your site is all over the map, you probably won't see well-targeted ads. And you'll see more PSAs, so be sure to have alternate URLs ready.