Image Ads Above AdSense Ads Increases CTR?

At http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002251.html (Image Ads Above AdSense Ads Increase CTR) I read about placement of an image.

Anybody want to say something for all of us to know/discuss.

 

I thought critters was a girl for a long time too.

Also, google later weighed in on this and said you need to put a visual barrier between the images and the ads. Long time ago.

 

I wanted to confirm if we place ads next to images in a table would that be against TOS!!

What exactly is the visual barrier? I mean i am putting up ads in one table and another table has images with no arrows pointing between the ads. Its just sperate table !! Would that still be against the TOS ?

I was also reading about this at Webmaster World. But i did not really got the idea whether it is against TOS? People there say that they mailed google the sample of the ads with images and they said it was OK.

 

You can get more info here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17104

 

visual barrier means insert a horizontal rule or table between the ads and images

 

If i make the border of table zero (invisible) wold that be fine ?

 

that is like the border between Canada and the US . I don't think using a border of zero qualifies as a barier