Making things "invisible" in ads, violation of TOS

I noticed here that the website doesn't display in the ads? I dunno if they are doing it here, but I've seen sites where they change the font so it's either the background, or something very close to it so it's barely visible. That's a breach of the TOS right?

 

Yes, changing the color of anything in an ad to be invisible is a breach of the ToS. In fact, Google will automatically change the color of text in the ad if you try to make it invisible.

But the ads that are showing without URLs are like that because Google sometimes just displays the ads like that. I'm not sure what ad formats or criteria goes into displaying ads like that.

 

Yea, sometimes, if you're background color is dark enough, they will automatically set the URL color to a light color.

 

Google can prevent the same color problem by automatically changing the ads font color.

 

Sometimes the ads are just displayed that way, regardless of whether the urls are prominent against the background color or not.

 

well as always just shoot them a email with your page and ask whats up

 

It is 100% against the TOS and it is also not possible to completely make it invisible as Google resets the code in such cases.
Like, if all the colors in the code are changed to "FFFFFF" or "000000", then the ads are displayed as in default code. I have seen that happen while playing around with the code colors.
But have not done the mistake of masking anything in the ads!