AdSense book author banned

Well, not quite, but it looks like my recent April fool's joke got flagged by one of Google's automated AdSense-publisher-checking system. (You don't think they do it all manually, do you?). Here's an extract from the email I received:

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “click the ads,” “support our sponsors,” “visit these recommended links,” or other similar language that could apply to the Google ads on your site. Publishers may not use arrows or other symbols to direct attention to the ads on their sites, and publishers may not label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.”

This is not the first time I've received such a letter (the first time was when I was a bit too aggressive with ad layout on vioxx-lawsuit-questions.info) but I see they've updated it to include the phrase “may not use arrows or other symbols to direct attention to the ads on their sites”, a direct reference to something one of the AdSense e-books was promoting a couple of years go. (Some people are still recommending it… like the video I saw recently that said to place a picture of someone smoking on a page about stopping smoking and to make sure the cigarette in the person's mouth was pointed at the ads…)

Anyhow, when you get this kind of email all you do is fix up the offending page(s) and send them back a (polite) email asking them to review the changes and then you proceed on as usual. It's not that big a deal. They don't normally terminate an account without warning unless there's good cause. In this particular case, however, I'd rather not remove the joke, so we'll see what they say — I do explicitly note at the top that it's a joke and that you shouldn't click any ads, after all. We'll see what they say, but if it disappears entirely you'll know what the answer was…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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