Hiya, I'm new but I've been reading for a while I have a community based site with a lot of regular visitors who get "ad blindness" so I've seen it called. I get a lot of hits from google and google images. So I have used PHP to only show a leaderboard ad when the refferrer is google/google images. Is this ok? I can't find anything in the TOS about this but I'm worried that google may go to my site to check and they won't see the ad (because their refferrer won't be google most likely) and they will get suss about that.
I'm not showing them to google, I'm showing them to the people that do searches on google and end up at my page (which is a majority of my traffic). I just don't want to show them to my regular visitors because 1) I like them 2) They never click anyway.
Why not just make it so that only visitors can see the ads and members won't. Something like "register now to get rid of the ads".. That way it won't be seen as cloaking. That's almost the same thing as the one you're doing, but this way it won't seem like you're hiding the fact and you can probably get some new members too I've seen some sites do that, but to be sure, you can email Google
heh Thanks, I already have a system that you can subscribe for a small fee and not have ads (among other things). I have emailed google, hopefully I'll hear back from them soon