AdSense Facts & Fictions Part VI: User-Generated Content

Fiction: I shouldn’t be held responsible if users post content on my site or network that violates AdSense policies.

Fact: You are responsible for ensuring that all of your content, including user-generated content such as forum posts, blog comments or outside feeds, is in compliance with AdSense policies on any page or site for which you’ve enabled AdSense ads.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts in this series, we regularly review the content in the AdSense network to ensure that it's safe for advertisers, users, and publishers, as network quality is of premium importance. Just as you, our publishers, expect us to do all we can to remove undesirable ads, our advertisers expect high standards to be maintained; for example, a company using AdWords to market baby clothes doesn’t want their ads to appear next to violent or mature content. In order to be transparent about what kinds of content violate our policies, we’ve published a complete list in our Help Center.

Making sure content complies with our policies can be complex when factoring in user-generated content. Keeping tabs on the hundreds (or even thousands!) of videos, blog posts, photos, tweets, and comments that can come in every day is a massive undertaking. However, you are ultimately responsible for all sites on which you have placed your ad code, regardless of whether you own or have produced the content. This blog post provides a few suggestions to help you prevent and monitor potential content violations.

In most cases, our first step after a policy violation is found is to issue a policy notification for the site. Exceptions include DMCA and egregious policy violations, more details here. After the initial notification, you need to take action, not simply respond to the warning, but implement solutions to proactively ensure that violating content is removed and new content added to the network or site complies with our policies.

We understand that it can take time to find the best solution to prevent problematic content from appearing on your site and we want to work with you to give you the time needed to find a fix. If it becomes evident that a publisher is unable to do so, or if the violation is continuing or egregious, then we will disable an account. We offer an appeals process, but the bottom line is, we can’t partner with publishers that pose a risk to our advertisers (just as we won’t partner with advertisers that could compromise you).

We know how hard you work to make sure that your sites are of the highest quality and free of adult content, unoriginal content, or anything else that may violate policies and we thank you for your efforts. When advertisers, publishers, and users know they can trust the integrity of our advertising environment, everyone wins.

Posted by Hannah Schlesinger - AdSense Policy team

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post implied that an AdSense publisher has to proactively screen all content on his or her site. While publishers are required to take steps to keep the pages on which ads appear free from content that violates our policies, there are various methods that publishers can take to do this (see here for tips).

Expand your business with the Chrome Web Store

This is a guest blog post from the Chrome Web Store team, presenting you an opportunity to grow your business on the web.

“How do I grow my business to millions of users?” “How can I increase the revenue I earn on the web?” These are two questions all online businesses try to answer.

The Chrome Web Store can help you with both. By listing your web apps in the store, you can present your products and services to the more than 120 million people who use Chrome regularly. You can also earn income by selling your applications to Chrome users or by showing ads within your apps.

To learn how to take advantage of this opportunity, visit www.google.com/chrome/createanapp and watch the video below.



Posted by Peter Chane - New Business Development, Chrome Web Store

New Interface Wednesdays: Graphs right in your account

This is the first post in our ‘New Interface Wednesdays’ series. Every Wednesday for the next few months we'll highlight something new you can do in the new AdSense interface. From time to time, we’ll also share stories directly from publishers who've been using the new interface and announce additional features we’ve recently added.

For our first ‘New Interface Wednesdays’ post, we’d like to highlight the graphical reporting under the Performance Reports tab in the new interface. The new graphs make it easy to see trends in your performance. Rather than scanning rows of numbers, you can view impressions, clicks, and earnings, all in one graph.

Select the metrics you want to see by checking the boxes next to the graph. You can also hover over the graph to get detailed metrics for a specific day, just like in Google Analytics. The graph will appear for just about any type of report you run, making it easy for you to visualize performance. Above the graph, you'll find buttons to save reports that you commonly use and set a report of your choosing to be the default report with a single click. Of course, you can still export the data to a CSV to further process the data in a spreadsheet as well.


If you aren’t yet familiar with the graphs in the new interface, check them out today. Navigate to the new interface and click on the Performance reports tab.

Posted by Guillaume Ryder - AdSense Engineer

A success story made possible by AdSense

Today, we bring you a success story from India, CarDekho.com, an auto portal, who made it big in the Indian online space thanks to AdSense.

Cardekho.com is one of the top auto portals in India that assists new and used car buyers to make informed buying decisions by offering them a variety of research tools and reviews. Co-founders Amit and Anurag launched Cardekho in March 2008, like every new business venture, were struggling to monetize. Luckily, Anurag discovered AdSense and was delighted by the prospect of finding revenue without needing VC funding.

They experimented with various products and features, and found the most success using the features highlighted below:

• Filtering options help them eliminate irrelevant ads. They use this feature carefully and intelligently so they don’t unnecessarily block good revenue.
• Top banner above-the-fold (beside the logo) ad placement is the top earning slot for them.
• Placing ad units in the “F pattern” helps them optimize visibility of ads.
• Showing text ads when content on the page is mostly images and image ads when content on the page is text-heavy. This helps make the page look better and improves ad visibility.
• Channels tell them how their ads are doing and how well they can perform if placed somewhere else on the site.

Because of their AdSense revenue, the CarDekho team can focus their efforts on providing useful and quality information on their website to ensure a good user experience, rather than worrying about monetization.

Amit, co-founder, shares, “AdSense is a must-have for all sites looking forward to a sustainable and profitable business model. It may not be the primary source of income as you scale your business model to earn from other sources. AdSense does add to considerable amount of revenues generated without having to worry about hiring a sales team to sell inventory...Had it not been for AdSense, CarDekho would not have come this far without VC funding.”

Have a success story of your own? We’d love to here it. Fill out this form to let us know how AdSense has helped you and your business!

Posted by Sheeba Eustachius - AdSense India

Sensitive category blocking now available in three more languages

Since our announcement last August that sensitive category blocking had been expanded to more languages, we’re excited to say the language expansion has gone even further!

This week, publishers in Thai, Turkish, and Russian-speaking countries can now block ads in sensitive categories for all supported languages. The full list of supported languages spans English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, and now Thai, Turkish, and Russian.

With sensitive category blocking, you can prevent ads from up to 11 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be blocked if they're in any of the supported languages, regardless of how they've been targeted to your pages.

If you’d like to set up sensitive category blocking, sign in to your AdSense account. We recommend using the new AdSense interface, which you can access by clicking the “Try the new AdSense interface” link that appears in the upper corner of your account. Once you're in the new interface, visit the Allow and block ads tab and choose the Settings page to edit the list of sensitive ad categories you wish you display. To help you understand the impact of applying these filters, this page also shows you the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you've been receiving from each category in the last 30 days.

If you prefer to use the previous version of the AdSense interface, visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. Once you click 'change', you'll be able to see the full list of categories you can block.

For more information about sensitive category blocking, we encourage you to visit our Help Center.

Posted by Dan Stokeley - AdSense Product Manager

Three steps to getting paid on time

Here on the payments team at AdSense, we strive to help you understand how and when you can be paid. Here’s a basic walk-through of 3 steps that will properly set up your account to receive its next payment:

1) Verify that your account isn't on hold.
If you see a message about a payments hold when you sign in to your AdSense account, you likely still have to complete one or more of the following steps:

• Verify your mailing address by receiving a PIN in the mail and entering it in your account
• Select a payment method
• Submit your tax information (if it's required in your location)
• Remove your self-hold if you had previously placed one on your account

This message will include links to the relevant steps to remove your holds, as well as a link to contact us. Please contact us only if your account is still on hold after you've completed the steps. We’ll be happy to help you remove it!

2) Verify that the cumulative total of your unpaid finalized earnings has crossed the payments threshold.
Visit your payments page and view your monthly balance. If this total exceeds your country’s payments threshold, you are eligible to be issued a payment later this month. Congratulations!

If you don't see finalized earnings from the previous month, either you didn't accrue any earnings or you’ll have to wait a few days for them to show up.

3) Verify that you have successfully set up a payment method.
Our payment options vary by country. Using the new AdSense interface, view the payment methods that are available to you by clicking on “edit payment method” located under “account settings.” If Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) is available in your country, we highly recommend it as the fastest and easiest option available. We’re always trying to launch new forms of payment in different countries, so stay tuned to the blog if you don’t see your preferred form of payment yet.

Lastly, in the unlikely event that you are experiencing a payment problem that you can’t resolve, please view our Known Issues page or search for your issue on the AdSense Help Forum. These are valuable resources and often contain the answers to many of our most frequently received questions.

Posted by Sharlene Su - AdSense Payments team

Site maintenance on Saturday, January 15

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PST. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense account during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

London - 6pm Saturday
Alexandria - 8pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 11:30pm Saturday
Jakarta - 1am Sunday
Perth - 2am Sunday

To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team

New features now available in the new AdSense interface

Since our post announcing the open beta of the new AdSense interface, we’ve been working on a few additional features, listening closely to your feedback about how we can continue to improve. We’re very excited to announce a few changes that will further enhance your AdSense account management experience:

1. We’ve changed the default metrics shown on the Home and Performance reports pages based on strong feedback that most of you prefer to view your earnings at the page level rather than by ad unit. As a result, we’ve switched back to page level metrics, and those of you who wish to see ad unit CTR and other ad unit level metrics can now do so under the Performance reports tab.
2. The Allow and block ads drop-down selector, which lets you see your blocking features by product, has been updated to call out the product name. This makes the interface a lot more clear for those of you using multiple products.
3. Ad unit impressions and queries have been renamed ‘Ad requests’ to better describe how this statistic is used for AdSense for content, AdSense for search, and other products. An ad request is recorded each time an ad unit on your site requests ads from Google's servers (for content ads) or a search query is made (for search ads). We report an ad request each time a request was sent, even if no ads were returned and public service ads, backup ads, or no ads were displayed instead.
4. Based on feedback, we’ve updated the terms found under the Ad types section of your Performance reports to include text, image, rich media, animated image, and flash. Previously, rich media ads were referred to as HTML and animated image was called dynamic image.
5. For publishers using our AdSense for games and AdSense for video products, you can now create and edit channels and see reporting for these products. Learn more about AdSense for games and AdSense for video.

Thanks again for all of your great feedback. We’ll let you know as we continue to roll out new features. In the meantime, keep the comments coming on the blog or in this Forum discussion!

Posted by Vincent Zanotti and Guillaume Ryder - AdSense Engineering

AdSense Facts & Fiction Part V: Unoriginal content

Fiction: Publishers can put ads on auto-generated pages or other copied content that was not created by them.

Fact: We don’t allow sites with auto-generated or otherwise unoriginal content to participate in the AdSense program. This is to ensure that our users are benefiting from a unique online experience and that our advertisers are partnering with useful and relevant sites.

In the past, we’ve talked about tips for maintaining an AdSense-friendly site with user-generated content (UGC). Today's topic is not only applicable to UGC sites, but also to all websites affiliated with AdSense for content.

Sometimes we come across sites that are using software to generate automated content. These sites might look like normal news sites, but the information is completely plagiarized. Scraping content and passing it off as one’s own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies. AdSense depends on maintaining a balance between user, publisher, and advertiser experience. We strive to protect that ecosystem as much as possible by encouraging and protecting unique and relevant content.

Obviously publishers and Google are concerned with revenue generation, and when original traffic encounters quality content, it’s a match made in heaven. The best way to engage users in the long term is to engage users. Provide your opinion on the news, offer a different service, organize your site in a way so that a user is captivated and moved.

Take some time to familiarize yourself with these webmaster quality guidelines, and if you find sites within our network that are clearly violating these guidelines, feel free to report it to us.

One last thing: a quick, but well-deserved thank you to the majority of you that continue to inspire us with your great, unique, and creative content. Keep up the awesome work!

Posted by Cecelia Choi - AdSense Policy team

Fresh year, fresh start

Welcome to 2011! Though it may be hard to stick to all of your New Year's resolutions (we can’t say no to donuts either) we want to help keep you on track by giving you ten quick and easy AdSense resolutions you can be sure to keep:

• Use the new AdSense interface to get more insight, control, and efficiency with your account.

• Enable text and image ads so all available advertisers can bid to appear on your site.

• Use wider ad units which are more reader-friendly and used by more advertisers

• Place ads above the fold and maximize your coverage with three standard AdSense for content ad units, three link units, and two AdSense for search boxes on each page of your site.

• Use channels to measure the outcome of any tests you run by grouping and tracking ad units as you choose.

• Turn those channels into ad placements so advertisers can pick specific groups of ad units on your site that they want to target.

• Go through the AdSense checklist to learn about new AdSense features and brush up on your program knowledge.

• Follow us on Twitter to get quick updates on the latest features, AdSense tips, and Google highlights.

• Join the conversation in the Help Forum to connect with other publishers and get your questions answered.

• Bookmark our troubleshooter so you can quickly diagnose and fix the issue should ads stop showing on your site.

Over here in AdSense, we have some resolutions of our own to keep. Our top priority is to focus on growing and strengthening our relationships with all of you, our valued publishers. We’re working on ways to make Google’s publisher solutions more seamless and integrated, so you don’t miss any opportunities to maximize revenue and enhance your online content. The recent launch of the new AdSense interface is just the start of what the new year holds for future improvements. We’re constantly innovating and we encourage you to do the same.

We hope these tips help you start the year off with a bang. And treat yourself to a donut with the extra revenue you earn -- we promise not to tell.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit - Inside AdSense team