Friday 19 January 2007

Lesser Known Forbidden Uses of AdSense

In the depth of the AdSense Terms and Conditions, in the Prohibited Uses section, you will find the following:

You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to . . . display any Ad(s), Link(s), or Referral Button(s) on any error page, on any registration or "thank you" page (e.g., a page that thanks a user after he/she has registered with the applicable Web site), on any chat page, in any email, or on any Web page or any Web site that contains any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content;
The two "prohibitions" that I want to concentrate on in this post are the "registration page" and the "thank you page."

Even though this is consistent with Google's requirement that ads be placed on pages with "content," I can foresee a situation whereby this condition is unintentionally breached.

If your web site has been created as a dynamic site, using a technology such as ASP, ASP.net, PHP, ColdFusion, or even SHTML, you may well have created a site template that incorporates your AdSense ads into each and every page of your site via a standard "include file" or template file. If that is the case and your site contains a registration page or a thank you page, then you will need to conditionally remove the AdSense ads from those pages in order to comply with the Terms and Conditions.

(Note, by "conditionally" I mean by using programming logic such as: if page = registration then don't display ads).

This example shows you just how easy it is to unwittingly fall foul of AdSense's Terms and Conditions!

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ian
the proviso against contact and error pages etc. has been changed, tho not in the TOS for over a year where it still says "non-content".

Regards

Paul
www.bettersearchenginerank.com

Ian said...

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but the provisions against registratin and thank you pages are still in the Terms and Conditions. The quote in my post was copied directly from them.

Ian