Protect Your Google Adsense Account from Getting Banned

Google Adsense Terms of Service (ToS)Google Adsense is the leading company in web advertising programs which is a large system of earning for your website. Similar to all other great advertising programs, Google Adsense has well define Terms of Service (ToS) that are required to be strictly followed in order to receive benefits from this great opportunity to earn online.

I am sharing some important Adsense tips; some mistakes which should be avoid in order to protect your Adsense account from getting banned by Google Adsense. These tips are gathered from the Google Terms and Conditions and information from FAQ at Google Adsense. You may already know some of these tips but those who don’t know or new to Google Adsense web advertising program I would try to explain it in very simple manners.

  • Never try to click your own Adsense ads or get them clicked – You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Don’t even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

  • Avoid changing the Adsense code – There are enough means of Adsense optimization & customizations available to change the color, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to color and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

  • Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services – Never run such ads or services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the Adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links. Update: Google has allowed you to run contextual advertising like Yahoo ads, Chitika etc provided the ads do not resemble Adsense ads.

  • Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default – Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

  • One Account suffices for multiple websites – You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fears that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

  • Place ads only on Content Pages – Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you” or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

  • Do not mask ad elements – Alteration of colors and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the URL part is of the same color as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

  • Keep track of your content – So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

  • Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing – Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google Adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

  • Ensure you Language is Supported – Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, Adsense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

  • Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads – Several services like Chitika eMiniMalls allow you to place alternate URLs, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating a simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate URL feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate URLs.

  • Do not confuse with adjacent images – It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors.

It is always better to inquire for Adsense help from the educated staff of Google Adsense. This way you can avoid the common mistakes that could ban your Google Adsense Account.

Posted under PPC

Avoiding Top SEO Mistakes

9 Biggest Seo Mistakes

Following are the 9 Biggest SEO Mistakes which Web Designers & Web Developers should avoid.

Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because, ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (i.e. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

“Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But, if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use, that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:

Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because, every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the Title Tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit:

Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:

Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures”

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj”.

Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title

Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

These things are the pillars of Search Engine Optimization and so to your web site’s success path.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization