For Adsense, for contextual ads, google will be scanning/crawling the website content to serve relevant ads, but for the referral buttons or links google will not know if you are showing illegal content. They will just see that your publisher ID has sent a referral. or Am I wrong??
I'm not sure myself. It's better to ask the Adsense support I guess, you don't wanna get banned for something like that. And anyways, Adsense referrals doesn't work too well for me, i still prefer good old text links.
Referrals have worked wonders for some sites. And remember that you can ask your visitors to click on the referral button unlike adsense units. So you can really get innovative on the ad-copy.
It's best to ask Adsense, I don't think it will be allowed for some things. For example, I don't think Adsense will want their referral buttons on porn sites or sites that have illegal content.
Yeah, but how would they know? They won't have to crawl the site to serve the site with ads. We can just add the affiliate type of link to the site
I'm not sure how they will know as I don't work for Google, lol. But anyway, it's easy for them to look at where their traffic is coming from and also they could easily have a script that checks to content of the page that each referral is on.