Tos Tos - Displaying ads in Divs or Tables

I'm making this directory as a way of recieving links to my main site and I'd like to get a little adsense revenue from it and have put the ads at the top of the page in a css styled frame.

Does anyone see a problem with the way these ads load (ctrl f5 in IE) as regards to TOS as I can't see anything there about css implementation of ads.

I've yet to see if this has any effect on CTR but I'd like to see what happens.

http://www.directory.water-well.net/

 

You're not altering the ads themselves so there's nothing wrong in terms of the TOS.
Having the ads in a table or div is pretty much standard practice.

 

I know that divs and tables are ok but did you notice anything when they loaded? It's very subtle I know but maybe too subtle

If you do a hard refresh you might see.

 

Do you mean the colors that display before the page loads? If it is that I'd ask my self why are the colors there, is it to bring undue attention to the ads?

 

I'd say yes they are but I'd like to use the word "focus" in place of "undue".

 

It's not something I'd feel comfortable doing, if you have any doubts ask the big G

 

I had to clear my cache in order to see that.
If I was you I'd clear it with Google. I'm not sure whether they'd class that as bringing undue attention to the ads or not.
Personally I like it and think it's pretty subtle. You want to stop a users browser from caching things though - else they only see it once. iirc you can do something like <META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache"> but it's a while since I've used it so I don't know if browsers still pay attention to that.

edit: if you do contact Google, please report back with what they say.

 

I wouldn't no cache it coz that would slow people down too much who really were using the directory.

It was really just for those one page view visits.

I will ask Google to look at the page and see what they say.

 

I mailed Google and got this reply:

Which means it's ok and I don't think what I'm doing is drawing "undue" attention. It remains to been seen if something like this does actually attract any extra clicks.

 

That was a speedy response off them, good luck with it I'll be interested to hear how you get on.

 

It will be very interesting to see what results you get.
I might just try it on one of my sites and see what happens.

 

I thought you weren't allowed to place any border arround the ads, however i can't find that in the guidelines so I think they have rephrased it to "undue attention". I'm sure back in 2003 you weren't allowed a border...