In my mission to educate AdSense publishers, I sometimes stumble across examples of publishers who are breaking the rules, perhaps unknowingly. I'm not a big fan of the AdSense referral buttons (they're not big money-makers) but if you choose to use them on your site you must understand the rules about their use. Here are a couple of egregious referral button uses that will land you in trouble with Google. I meant to do this yesterday, but then I had to break the story about the the new AdSense API.
The first example is from CouponMountain:
While the “FREE SIGN UP” text and the arrows are cleverly done, they also violate this rule in the AdSense terms and conditions:
5. Prohibited Uses. You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to: (i) directly or indirectly generate queries, Referral Events, or impressions of or clicks on any Ad, Link, Search Result, or Referral Button….
You can't do anything to encourage visitors to click referral buttons other than use vague phrases like “I highly recommend you join Google's AdSense program”, without calling attention to the referral buttons. Now, I've always thought this rule rather silly for the AdSense referrals because of the time delay in getting referral payments, but the rules are the rules. (The example above reminds me of the first edition of Joel Comm's AdSense e-book that recommended using big red arrows to point visitors right at the ads… oops… that was taken out of later editions…)
The second example is from RateItAll, the site that accidentally broke the embargo on the AdSense API yesterday:
There are two problems here. One is that they're encouraging clicks on the referral buttons, as with the previous example. The second is that they're using too many referral buttons (there's actually a third one that you can't see in this screenshot, at the bottom of that page). According to the AdSense program policies, which are part of the terms and conditions:
A single referral button per product may be placed on a page up to a maximum of 4 buttons, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above. Referral buttons are considered to be ‘Google ads’ for purposes of these program policies.
Ooops again, three buttons referring the same product (AdSense) is two buttons too many. Plus there's the fact that their placement of those buttons looks pretty ugly, too.
Let's see how quickly those pages get modified…
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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.