One of the comments to my recent posting about The Single Page AdSense Site objected to this statement I made:
A horizontal link unit at the top of the page will work well here because it looks like a navigational item.
If you're a regular reader, you know that I always recommend the use of horizontal link units as opposed to vertical link units. (That said, everyone's site is different and what works for most sites won't necessarily work for yours — that's why it's important to test different ad formats, layouts and colors to see what works best for you. But that's a different topic.) Visually, I find that horizontal link units are easier to blend into the site. You can put one unobtrusively at the top of almost any page, for example. Take a look at this page and this page for examples. Vertical link units, on the other hand, can look out of place unless you go out of your way to create lookalike link blocks.
A horizontal link unit, by the way, consists of a single-row table with four columns: a spacer, the “Ads by Google” link, another spacer, and a nested table. The link units are in the nested table, of course, and the number of columns in the nested table varies depending on how many link units there are.
But let's get back to the topic at hand: are link units, especially the horizontal ones, deceitful? To some degree, I'd have to say “yes”. Consider this example I've faked up:
Now compare it to a horizontal link unit:
To my Western eye (and I'm thinking different rules apply in languages that read right-to-left or top-to-bottom), the links in the vertical link unit are clearly associated with the “Ads by Eric” caption. The links in the horizontal link unit aren't as clearly associated, however. (All it would take, though, would be a colon after the “Ads by Eric”, to make the association clear.) In fact, if you place them near navigational links then it's not surprising that visitors may click on them out of confusion.
I'm going to save my thoughts on the ethics of this for later. In the meantime, I'd love to hear what comments you have on this…
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.