Google Adsense’s official blog announced today that an ad below a post title is not allowed. Here’s what is written on their post:
1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
For example, ads shouldn’t be placed under titles such as “Dallas Business Opportunities†or “Today’s Hot Dealsâ€. Placing ads directly below titles such as these implies to your users that the links in the ads are publisher-created content. The example below shows a placement that does not follow this guideline.
It means that my tip on ad placement on this post is already illegal now. I updated my template and as you can see now, my post wraps around the ads now. I think, you can distinguish the ads from the content now unlike before. Well, I will still e-mail Google Adsense to make sure that my implementation now does not violate their TOS. Hope this change will not dramatically affect my CTR.
Update: Rereading it tells me that we can still put ad below the post title as long as the title is not misleading. However, due to the way I put titles on my post, like “Friendster Skins” or “Batangas Beach Resorts”, which seems misleading to me if an ad is directly below it, I just decided to wrap around the post on the ads than reviewing each of my post to correct it.
Update 2: I removed the wrap around and instead put the ad after the Kontera notice and invitation to RSS subscription. I’m not sure if this does not violate the TOS anymore, but I think, it isn’t. I’ll e-mail Google for confirmation. 😉
Technorati Tags: Google Adsense, Ad Placement
