The rules of AdSense use have been changing lately. Make sure you’re up to date.

The changes mostly make a lot of sense. No more lining up pictures with the ads, for example. Yes, I know many publishers loved doing that, but the advertisers definitely weren’t so fond of the practice. Remember, AdSense is nothing without willing publishers. Losing the pictures means losing a major tactic for improving your clickthrough rate, but it’s not too bad a thing.

One to be very careful about is the use of competitive ads. You aren’t allowed to use the same colors on competitive ads and your AdSense ads if they appear on the same website. This appears to be a per site policy, not by the page, a very important difference.

A tough one to enforce but one that should really make things interesting for scraper sites is that ads are not to be published on sites with copyrighted information that you don’t have the right to publish. I like this rule, since scraper sites are a major problem, but the enforcement should get interesting. Don’t quite know how it will all work.

A change that delights me is that now you can publish the referral links twice for each product. This is a delightful advantage, as I have some of the product referral links on the sidebars of some of my blogs, but if I wanted to blog about them I would have to point out the link on the side, rather than within the post itself. Very inconvenient.

Overall, I’m pleased. I’ll have to check some of my alternative ads on one of my sites, as I don’t recall their appearance. Can’t have them resemble my AdSense too much now. Otherwise I believe I’m nicely in the clear on this.

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