One of the downsides of having multiple sites is that there’s more to manage. I was editing my Squidoo lens this morning to add the Clueless About feed, but the feed kept timing out. After some investigation I determined that someone had hacked the site and inserted various penis-related links into the main index.php file, hidden within a zero-sized font tag. A look at some of my other blogs showed the same problem, as well as world-writable directories. Sigh. So today I’m cleaning up the mess. I’m not sure how the exploit happened yet, but it’s probably a WordPress vulnerability. I was going to write about made for AdSense sites today, but that has to wait now until I fix things. (If you depend on organic search traffic, it’s important to fix these things as soon as you can, before you get penalized for excessive links to bad neighbourhoods…)

Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.

Looks like the general outcry over changes to the AdSense referrals program has had an effect:

Hello AdSense publisher,

We are writing to give you an important follow-up to the changes we announced earlier this month to the referrals to AdSense program. Since announcing the changes, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher rather than the referred user. After carefully considering this feedback, we have decided to modify our planned changes.

Specifically, you will have the option to add a referral unit for AdSense within your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.

We’d also like to let you know about upcoming changes to the referrals programs for Google Pack and Firefox:

Google Pack: Currently, you can earn up to $2 when a user downloads and runs Google Pack for the first time after being referred through your link or button. Starting the third week of February, each successful Pack referral will earn up to $1. This change will apply to all referrals for Google Pack and is independent of user location or publisher location.

Firefox: We will also be reducing payments for Firefox referrals from China during the third week of February. This specific referral payment change will only affect installations from users in China. As with referrals to AdSense, this is independent of your location as a publisher.

We understand that these changes may decrease revenue for some of you currently participating in these referrals programs. While it is our goal to help publishers earn as much as possible with the AdSense program, like any other referrals advertiser, we are constantly evaluating our campaigns to make them effective and sustainable.

Again, thank you for your feedback and support of the referrals program.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Making the referral validity dependent on where the potential referree (the page visitor) is instead of where the AdSense publisher is located makes a lot more sense, since presumably there’s a correlation between where new publishers are located and how well Google fares from them. They still haven’t said why they’ve made these changes in the first place, one can only assume that they’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that they’re losing money due to fraud from certain areas of the world. Less money means fewer espressos and other goodies for their overworked developers, so we can’t have that!

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Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.

Keeping abreast of AdSense program policy changes is one of the many things an AdSense publisher must do. Changes occur from time to time and you don’t want to find yourself in violation of the policies, so it’s important to keep up with what’s new in the AdSense world.

One of the important parts of the program policies limits how many snippets of AdSense code you can place on any given page of a website. Here are the current limits, as taken directly from the Ad Placement section of the program policies:

• Up to three ad units may be displayed on each page.
• A maximum of two Google AdSense for search boxes may be placed on a page.
• Up to three link units may also be placed on each page.
• Up to three referral units may be displayed on a page, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above.
• AdSense for search results pages may show only a single ad link unit in addition to the ads Google serves with the search results. No other ads may be displayed on your search results page.
• No Google ad or Google search box may be displayed in a pop-up, pop-under, or in an email.
• Elements on a page must not obscure any portion of the ads.
• No Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages.
• No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.

The maximum-of-three limit for ad units hasn’t changed in a long time. Link unit limits changed from 1 to 3 almost a year ago. Referral unit limits have varied, for a while you were able to use up to 2 referral units per product on a page, but the current limit is 3 total per page.

Search boxes are perhaps under-utilized. The limit of two means that you can have one search box for searching Google and one for searching your site.

The remaining restrictions have more to do with anti-MFA (Made For AdSense) initiatives than anything else, but are still good to know.

Remember that checking the program policies is very easy to do. Just open your AdSense management console (i.e. login to your AdSense account) and you’ll find links at the bottom to both the program policies and the terms and conditions. Note that the program policies are considered part of the terms and conditions, so not following those policies is a simple way to get your account terminated. See How can I avoid being banned from AdSense?.

Sponsored Link: Read my Unique Article Wizard review for a recommended article distribution service.

Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.