Welcome to Land of Tricks

which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.
On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.
1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. 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. Dont 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.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, 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 colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.
3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.
4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search 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.
5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.
6. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.
7. 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.
8. 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 fear 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.
9. 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.
10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours 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 colour 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.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!
12. 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.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches - Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.
14. 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.
15. 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.
Update:

16. Maximum 2 referral button per product per page - With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only 2 referral buttons for adsense referral, adwords referral, Google pack and Firefox with google toolbar referral. Update: This feature is closing Aug 2008.
17. 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 an 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.
18. 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. More.
Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful!

Popularity: 12% [?]

Most of us are using Google Adsense contextual network to generate some revenue from our websites. As for Google’s explanation “Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money”.
In general, Adsense is a complementary to Adwords and this technology delivers ads that are relevant to your site content. In general, this should enhance your visitor’s possibility to find relevant information about products and services they are looking for. Thus it is beneficial to all participants of the game. Your visitors get relevant information, Adwords advertisers get targeted traffic to their sites and Adsense publishers get paid for delivering traffic for Adwords participants.

However, you are participating in a content network publishing and this network is considered by advertisers to be less effective than the Google search network. This encourages most of advertisers to lower bids when they are using the content network. Some of them are not using the content network at all. Even worse, some of the webmasters are using the content network to drive traffic to their Made For Adsense (MFA) sites. Their goal is to trade low cost traffic from their massive Adwords campaigns into clicks from high paying words. Those sites are not delivering useful information to your visitors. Traffic from those sites is not targeted and advertisers are turning their backs to contextual advertising because of the bad quality of traffic (quality of traffic could be estimated by the amount of sales per visit).

As a webmaster using the contextual network to generate revenue from your quality content, you are interested in getting rid of low paying ads from Made for Adsense sites. The Google Adsense control panel allows you to filter sites that you don’t want to display ads from. The question is, what sites should you filter? There is a great resource that can help you: http://www.adsblacklist.com/. You can join for free and participate in their work. AdsBlackList.com is an unique project and it’s purpose is to help you maximize your Adsense revenue with minimal effort. They provide you with a list of the most commonly filtered websites whose webmasters use Adwords to attract visitors for a low price click so they can convert it to a high price click on their own MFA (Made for Adsense) or Low Cost per Click site(s). I am currently trying out this service and I will share my results with you in a month. This should give us a good time sample to make a correct

Popularity: 14% [?]

 Recently, Google announced a new ad-targeting system that tracks where you go on the web, and tailors future ads to your interests. According to the announcement:

These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.

So whatever site you visit will be recorded and eventually, ads based on your browsing history will be shown. It will even track down your browsing behavior. If you put a shiny new Nikon D700 in your shopping cart, but never actually purchase it, Google will offer advertisers a way to place ads for the D700. Think of it as a way of constantly reminding you of the things you’re lusting after.

Creepy, right? Fortunately, Google offers ways to opt out of the new targeted ads system. They even provide a preference, and a browser plug-in, that can keep behavior-snooping bots at bay.

Log into your Google account and go over to the Google Ads Preferences page, wherein opting out puts in a cookie on your browser that will stop that pesky bot from monitoring and targeting ads. Obviously, the problem with that is whenever you clear your cookies (which most privacy-paranoid people are prone to do anyway), you need to opt out again. Which kind of sucks, because we want something that’s more permanent.

There’s the second option, an Opt-Out Preferences plugin that basically does the same job as the cookie, but this time its more permanent. Just go to the link and install it, the the DoubleClick cookie will be blocked from your browser as long as you have it on your PC. Unfortunately, the plugin is only for Internet Explorer and Firerfox. If you’re on Chrome, Safari or even Opera, there’s no way for you to use the plugin.

Popularity: 6% [?]