Compliant or Complacent? Ignore at Your Own Peril!
A recent issue caused a big headache for my Adsense earnings… resulting in a 40% drop in my income. Thankfully it’s now fixed, and it’s another of “life’s little lessons” which I can now share so you can avoid the problem for yourself!
About a month ago, around March 20, someone from Google’s Adsense team visited one of my long established directory web sites, and carried out a little “human initiated” search there… and found some “mature” content was presented in the search results… along with the display of Adsense ads.
The “mature” content was fairly tame (this is from Come On Aussie, an Australian web directory and does include a limited number of listings for adult sites) these search results only showed about one and a half lines of actual “teaser” text from each of four listings. All up… about 6 lines of “mature” content.
And despite the fact that I had deliberately programmed the actual static pages for each listing to NOT show any ads… the dynamic search results page WAS NOT COMPLIANT with the Adsense TOS!
(Technically, the whole site isn’t compliant because you are NOT supposed to have any “mature” content anywhere on a site which shows Adsense ads… thankfully however Google do recognise this site is a useful web resource. But if that ever becomes a problem… you can say bye-bye to the adult listings!)
Long story short…
They sent me a notice to fix the search results pages within three days… which for some reason I did NOT see (I think it got buried in my spam folder) and the end result…
Ad serving was turned off for that domain on 24th March.
It took a lot of to-ing and fro-ing backwards and forwards with the Adsense support team once I realised what had happened and fixed the “problem”, before ads were reinstated in the middle of April, and I missed out on about four weeks of Adsense income from that site! NOT a good feeling when it is one of your better performing sites.
So I’ve been interested in compliance issues a little more since then 
And one I discovered that probably 900% of Adsense publishers are overlooking is the requirement to have a privacy policy on any site displaying Adsense ads
And this HAD to be in place by 8th April 2009!
So if you want to run the risk of getting your Adsense earnings turned off, then do NOT modify and include this sample privacy policy provided by JenSense (Jennifer Slegg) on your site.
In fact… you probably ticked a box acknowledging the “new” terms and conditions recently when you logged in to your Adsense account… without actually realising WHAT you had agreed to.
Changes at ClickBank Too
Speaking of changes to terms and conditions… ClickBank ALSO had a very recent change to their Client Contract… and one thing that jumped out at me from a quick scan of that (there’s probably a LOT more I missed) was from Section 2 PROMOTING PRODUCTS:
e. You will not offer, suggest or imply the availability of any rebates, coupons, tickets, vouchers or similar incentives to induce or encourage the purchase of a Product.
Now that’s interesting, because a lot of marketers use a “bonus” as an incentive to purchase through their affiliate link.
In fact, I got one just a few minutes ago…
“When you get XXXX CLICKBANK PRODUCT today, I’m going to send you - as a Bonus - the YYYY Home Study Course ($47 value) as seen at…”
Sorry ClickBank affiliates.. that’s now a definite no-go as far as ClickBank is concerned.
Ignore at your own peril!
Tags: adsense adsense compliance clickbank clickbank compliancePopularity: 14% [?]
