Editor’s note: John Brown, the Head of Publisher Policy Communications, is explaining what to do if you receive a policy warning message.

In this post, I’d like to talk about policy warning messages and what steps you should take if you receive one. I’ll also answer some of the most common questions around warning messages.

What is a warning message?
We send out warning messages to our publishers if their site, or a page of their site, violates our AdSense policies. For minor policy violations that can be fixed fairly easily, our first step is to issue a warning.

Where can I see my warning message?
Warning messages are sent to the email address associated with your AdSense account. You can manage your contact email address under Personal Settings in your account. You can also check out outstanding policy violations by visiting the Status page in your AdSense account.

What do I do if I get a warning?
If you receive a warning message, follow these steps to fix the violation as quickly as possible:

1. Read the instructions in the warning message very carefully to understand how the flagged policy violation corresponds to the particular page of your site.


• Optimally, we would recommend simply removing Google AdSense code from the violating pages. You do not need to remove Google AdSense code from your whole website, just the violating pages.


• If you are unable to or unsure of how to remove the ads from these pages, or would like to continue monetizing the page with Google ads, please modify or remove the violating content to meet our AdSense policies.


2. Multiple pages of your site might be violating the policies. Check all your pages of all of your sites to make sure they’re compliant. 
3. When adding new content to your site on pages with Google ads, ensure that these pages comply with Google policies. Our warning emails include a URL from your website of a violating page, but it is possible that other pages on your site have violations as well. Review all your sites and pages to make sure they are policy compliant.

What is the timeline to fix the violation?
After receiving a warning, you should immediately take time to review your pages where Google AdSense code is implemented and ensure that it complies with our policies. If you fix the violation or remove the ad code from violating pages, you don’t need to contact us.

How do we determine how to send warning messages?
It is a common misconception that AdSense disables websites and sends warning messages randomly. We rely upon a detailed set of guidelines when looking at policy violations, which you can find in the AdSense Help Center.

Do we ever disable ad serving to a site without first sending a warning? 
There are some situations when we would need to disable ad serving to a site without first sending a warning. We usually take this action for extreme violations like adult content and copyright infringement, as well as cases of violent content. We may also disable ads to a site when we find a violation that we’ve already contacted a publisher about in the past.

How can I appeal a disabling and get ad serving reinstated?
If ad serving on your site is disabled due to a policy violation, there are steps you must take in order to have ads reinstated. First, the page(s) of your site that is in violation of Google policies must be reviewed. As mentioned in my previous blog post, our obligations to advertisers drive many of our policies and enforcement of our policies. Therefore, we simply ask that you remove our ad code from the violating page(s), ensuring our advertisements do not appear alongside content that violates Google policies. Once the ad code has been removed, you can then file an appeal after reviewing our policy appeals Help Center article. Sometimes users delete all their Google AdSense code; you don't need to remove the ad code from non-violating pages before sending the appeal.

To make sure that the appeal is a strong one, please tell us exactly what action you've taken on your site to resolve the violations and also tell us how you'll prevent similar occurrences in the future. I recommend that you include some other example URLs that you've taken action on proactively.  We want to work with our publishers to help them grow their businesses while remaining policy-compliant.

You can find more information about policy appeals here.

Is there a point at which an account can get shut down completely? 
The final and most severe action that our teams can take is to close down an account completely. This normally only happens when we find egregious policy violations, if a large portion of a publisher’s network consists of violating sites, or for repeat policy offenders.

I hope this helps you to deal with policy violations. For more information about policy warnings, check out this Help Center article. We’d love to hear your thoughts to improve our processes. Let us know what you think in the comment section below this post.

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Posted by John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

Editor’s note: John Brown, the Head of Publisher Policy Communications, is sharing insights about understanding your traffic and how you can prevent invalid activity.

Last week, I explained why we take invalid activity seriously and how AdSense policies protect users, advertisers and publishers. This week, I’d like to give you some tips to help you keep your account in good standing.

What can you do as a publisher?

Here are some best practices to prevent invalid activity on your site:

• Understand your traffic and site visitors by breaking down your traffic reports into meaningful segments/channels.

• Monitor your analytics often to spot traffic anomalies. Setting up Analytics alerts can be very useful. For instance, you can set Analytics alerts to see if an unusual amount of traffic comes from a country you wouldn’t expect for your site.

• Be very careful when purchasing any traffic, and review the traffic provider checklist to help guide your discussions with any traffic provider you’re considering.

• Double and triple-check your implementation. Make sure your implementation has no programming errors, conforms to AdSense policies, and interacts properly across different browsers and platforms. Having a well-implemented page can protect against unintended consequences, like accidental clicks. 

• Use the authorized sites feature to prevent unauthorized use of your ad code.

• Don’t click on your own ads. Even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL, clicking on your own ads is prohibited. Instead, use the Google Publisher Toolbar.

• If you notice any suspicious activity on your site, report via the Invalid Clicks Contact Form.

You can find more information about ad traffic quality and best practices on our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center. I hope these resources help clarify why we care about the quality of the ecosystem and what you can do to comply with our traffic policies. Please share your feedback and do let us know if you have additional questions in the comment section below this post.

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Posted by John Brown
Head of Publisher Policy Communications

Editor’s note: John Brown, the Head of Publisher Policy Communications, is sharing insights and answering most common questions about invalid activity.

In this post, I want to stress why we take invalid clicks so seriously and clarify a few questions related to traffic quality and invalid clicks.

Let’s take a step back and think about the digital ad ecosystem. The relationships between Google, advertisers, and publishers are built on trust. A strong and healthy digital ecosystem needs:

• Users who trust the system and have a good experience,
• Advertisers safely investing in digital ads,
• Publishers who can sustain their business.

To protect those relationships, it’s very important to make sure that clicks and impressions are based on genuine user intent. That’s why at Google we have a global team that monitors the traffic across Google's ad network, and prevents advertisers from paying for invalid traffic.

Now, I'd like to address some of the most common questions and concerns from publishers related to ad traffic quality and invalid clicks.

• What is Google's obligation to publishers?

Google manages advertiser relationships so that you don’t have to. Publishers benefit from our vast supply of ads. To provide ads to your sites for the months and years to come, advertisers must trust our network. Our policies are in place to protect these advertiser relationships, which ultimately protects publishers that work with us as well.

• What happens to earnings held back from publishers due to invalid activity?

Any revenue found to be from invalid activity is refunded back to the active advertisers, not kept by Google. In 2014, we refunded more than $200,000,000 to advertisers from detected invalid activity. In 2014, we’ve disabled more than 160,000 sites to protect the ecosystem.

• What can Google do to better communicate policies and enforcement?

We’ve adopted a policy of silence for the most part in order to protect our signals. We find it important to protect our signals so that bad actors cannot detect how we discover invalid activity. Additionally, we are always striving to increase transparency around our communications without compromising our techniques to protect advertisers and publishers. Stay tuned for new features which will help you have more control over your content and stay compliant with the policies.

• Will Google modify interactions with the publisher community going forward?

We realize that we can improve our communications, especially around warnings, suspensions, and account disablement.  My charge is to do this. I have many people working with me on better education, along with improving the language and instructions around warnings or messages received from Google. I believe that publishers understand much better where they stand at all times when our policies are clear and when we communicate them effectively, and enforce consistently.

I hope you found these insights useful. Check back here next week where we’ll talk about what you can do as a publisher to help us protect the digital ecosystem. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

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Posted by John Brown

Head of Publisher Policy Communications

Editor’s note: Today’s guest author is John Brown, the Head of Publisher Policy Communications. He’ll be sharing valuable insights about Google AdSense program policies with us.

We know that many of you have a steady income from AdSense to support your business. We also know that you are working hard to keep your account in good standing and we want to help you stay compliant with our policies while you publish your content the way you want.

We’ve defined AdSense program policies to ensure we all preserve a healthy digital ecosystem for the benefit of all users, advertisers, and publishers. We've gotten a lot of feedback from you that there's more we could be doing to make our policies clearer. To demystify any uncertainties or questions that you may have, I’d like to share more details on AdSense policies over the next few months.

To start with, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is John Brown, I’m the Head of Publisher Policy Communications at Google. I’ve spent more than 14 years in digital advertising in various leadership roles in business development, marketing, and product development. I understand the challenges faced by you every day and I’m passionate about building and growing relationships, protecting advertisers, and helping you develop sustainable solutions. We all strive to win your trust and prove the value of working with AdSense.

For today, let’s start by reviewing AdSense program policies at a high level:

• Your content is important. We will never suggest censoring your content to meet our policies. However, we have obligations to our advertisers. If you want to post or maintain content that is not compliant with the AdSense policies, simply remove the AdSense ad code from that page. We’re here to help you maintain and grow your online business.

• Get familiar with our ad implementation policies and content policies. I’d recommend reading adult content policy and copyright policy carefully.

• Keep an eye on invalid clicks by reviewing your traffic and CTR trends.

• Check these steps before filing a policy appeal. It’s always possible to appeal a policy violation once you remove Google ads from pages that violate our policies or once you address the policy violation. Remember that all policy appeals are reviewed by our team and we try to get back to every appeal within 72 hours.

Stay tuned to the Inside AdSense blog for more of these updates.

See you online!

Posted by John Brown, Head of Publisher Policy Communications
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(Cross-posted from the Google AdWords Blog)

Advertising helps fund great web services and enables companies of all sizes to grow their businesses online. However, this economy can also attract bad actors that want to abuse online advertising tools for harmful or deceptive purposes. 

We've allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web.  Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.

Following up on our 2012 report, below is an overview of how we fought bad ads and bad ad-funded content in 2013.

Stopping more bad ads from fewer bad sources

We removed more than 350 million bad ads from our systems in 2013.  To put that in perspective, if someone looked at each of these for one second, it would take them more than ten years to see them all.  This was a significant increase from approximately 220 million ads removed in 2012.  This trend has been consistent in the last several years and we attribute it to several factors, including: the growth of online advertising overall and constant improvement of our detection systems.

The number of advertisers we disabled, however, dropped from over 850,000 in 2012 to more than 270,000 in 2013.  In part, we attribute this decline to scammers — counterfeiters, for example — being thwarted by our safety screens and searching for less-secure targets.

Counter-attacking counterfeiters 

We continue to see positive results in our work to combat counterfeiters.  Attempts to market counterfeit goods on AdWords decreased by 47% in 2012 and 82% in 2013.  In parallel, the volume of complaints about these ads dropped by 85% in 2012 and by another 78% in 2013.

As these numbers have declined, we’re pleased to report that we’ve also banned fewer bad advertisers for counterfeit violations.  Last year, we banned approximately 14,000 advertisers for trying to sell counterfeit goods  — a decline of more than 80% compared to 2012.

Preventing good ads from funding bad content

Maintaining a healthy ads ecosystem isn’t just about stopping bad ads and advertisers; we closely monitor the sites and mobile apps that show our ads as well.  Early last year, we outlined some of this work, with a particular focus on our efforts to stop scammy ad-funded software, like toolbars, that provides a poor user-experience.

By the end of 2013, we had blacklisted more than 200,000 total publisher pages, an encouraging decline from last year, and disapproved more than 3,000,000 attempts to join our AdSense network.  We also removed more than 250,000 publisher accounts for various policy violations.  This includes more than 5,000 account removals for violating our copyright policies, an increase of more than 25% compared to 2012.

Here’s a more complete overview of our work to bust bad advertising practices in 2013:

Click to see full size infographic

This is an ever-evolving and ongoing fight.  Bad actors are relentless, often very sophisticated and will not rest on their laurels.  But neither will we.  Nothing is more important than the security of our users and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep them safe online.

Posted by Mike Hochberg, Director, Ads Engineering
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As part of our ongoing efforts to increase transparency around our policies, we've recently launched a policy FAQs section in our Help Center to address some of the commonly asked questions that we receive from our publishers.

Some example questions in this new section include:

Part 1: Site content

Would an image of a girl in a bikini be considered adult content?

Part 2: Ad implementation

When blending ads to match in with my site, how do I make sure that the ads don’t mimic the format of the content without having gaudy ads?

Part 3: Mobile-related

Is placing a 300 x 250 ad unit on top of a high-end mobile optimized page considered a policy violation?

Part 4: Appeals and violation reporting

My account got disabled and my appeal was denied. Is there any way I can start over?

Our AdSense policies are in place to ensure that Google’s display and search networks provide a safe and positive experience for our users, advertisers, and publishers.  We hope that you find these new FAQs helpful and we thank you for helping us maintain a compliant network.

Posted by Eri Shikamura - Inside AdSense Team
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To help you better understand our program policies, we’re holding a number of policy refreshers online over the coming weeks. In these sessions, we’ll take a closer look at some of the policies we’re asked most about and share some tips on how to stay compliant.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll review how you can keep your content compliant with an emphasis on:

• User generated content
• Copyrighted content 

Check out our full listing of recently recorded sessions as well as the schedule for upcoming sessions - and don’t forget to register.

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Specialist
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Our AdSense program policies are defined to ensure we all preserve a healthy ecosystem for users, advertisers and other publishers, and compliance with these policies is an absolute must for every publisher. We’ve heard your requests for more accessible information on policy issues and we’re happy to tell you that we are launching an additional policy notifications feature directly in your AdSense account. This will help you to quickly understand and address any potential policy issues.

Going forward, if our system detects a policy violation, you’ll receive both an email and an account notification with a link to view more details. Under the Policy violations section on the home tab, you can quickly access important information including details on each violation, the issue ID and an example of the violation on your site. The page will also include details on the action you need to take to resolve the violation.

We’ll be gradually rolling out this new feature over the coming weeks to all publisher accounts.  We hope that it helps you quickly identify and resolve any potential issues so you can focus on growing your business with AdSense. Please remember that as before, you'll need to ensure all of your sites comply with our policies. In addition to checking your account for any notifications, be sure to regularly review your sites for compliance with our policies.

Thanks for your continued feedback and suggestions on how we can continue improving AdSense for you. Please continue to share them on our AdSense +page and if you’d like more details on this new feature, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager
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We’re continuing our policy refresher series today, taking a closer look at what happens when we detect content that doesn’t comply with our policies.

As we've talked about often on this blog we maintain a set of policies for AdSense designed to foster a healthy ecosystem and protect our publishers, advertisers and users. The vast majority of content on AdSense publisher sites follows these policies. However, sometimes, our systems do find content that doesn't comply, in which case we'll send a notice to the affected publisher. Notifications can be viewed by signing in to your AdSense account and visiting the Messages page, under your Home tab. Additionally, notifications are sent to the email address associated with your AdSense account. A notification will outline whether it is a site warning/disabling or an account disabling issue. If it is a site warning then you have 72 hours to make changes and do not need to contact us. If your account has been disabled then you should review this help center article to find out more about why we would disable an entire account. The rest of this post will deal with what to do if you receive a site disabling notification.

The first step is to understand the nature of the violation. For more about the different causes and how we define them, you can visit our Help Center and review our program policies.

In some cases, you may be eligible to appeal. If this is the case, please take note of the following considerations in formulating your appeal:

• Make sure you understand the violation: each time we send a notification we include a snippet explaining the violation. If you still have questions following this, our Help Center contains a variety of information on program policies. We also encourage you to seek advice in our Forum - our Top Contributors have a lot of policy knowledge.
• Check your entire site: with each notification we send you a URL as an example of the violation. Keep in mind that this is only an example, the violation may be present on other pages on your site, and we expect you to take appropriate action throughout your entire site. In many cases publishers have found Google’s search operators, specifically the “site:” operator, to come in handy, particularly for content violations.
• Be thorough: we understand that AdSense means a lot to you, and having ad serving disabled may cost you revenue. Take your time when filing your appeal and look through your entire site. Writing a thorough appeal is more important than filing an appeal quickly.
• Tell us how you ensure that this won't happen again: if you were notified about a content violation, tell us what systems you have put in place to ensure that content violating our program policies won't be placed alongside AdSense ads again. Webmasters with large websites might talk about updating filters or hiring human reviewers, while blog owners may tell us that they have familiarized themselves with our adult content policy better, and ensure not to post certain type pictures again.
• Send us examples: were you notified for content violations? In that case send us some example URLs where you removed AdSense ads from. Were you notified because of ad implementation issues? Send us an example URL with your improved implementation - for some cases we will require pages with AdSense ad code implemented, even though ad serving is disabled.
• Err on the side of caution: you may disagree with our decision to disable ad serving to your site, but keep in mind that our policies exist to protect the entire network of users, advertisers and publishers.

We know that your sites are important to you. Please understand that we don't take these decisions lightly. For more information on appeals best practices, take a look at this help center article.

Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Team
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For our next installment of our policy refresher series, we’re talking about a topic we’re frequently asked about...adult content and keeping AdSense family-safe.

We’ve made a commitment to our users, advertisers and publishers to keep the AdSense network family-safe.  A general rule of thumb when it comes to the adult content policy is: if you wouldn’t want to share this content at a family dinner or view it in your boss’s office, you shouldn’t place AdSense code on it.

Let’s take a closer look at our adult content policy:



Still have questions? Don’t forget that we’ll be hosting a number of Hangouts on Air as part of our policy refreshers series.

Check the schedule below to sign up for our Hangout on Air about adult content.

View our Hangouts schedule

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Team
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Web trends and technology demand that your site evolves quickly to maintain a growing user base. We’ve heard your questions and feedback on areas like responsive design, and we’re happy to let you know that we’ve updated our existing guidelines around modifying the AdSense ad code. We hope that this increased flexibility will help you continue enhancing the user experience on your site.

Going forward, we will permit publishers to make modifications to the AdSense ad code so long as those modifications do not artificially inflate ad performance or harm advertisers and otherwise comply with our Terms and Conditions and program policies. This will enable you to try a range of techniques on your site such as:

• Responsive design: Enabling publishers to create a single webpage that will adapt to the device on which it’s being viewed, whether it’s a laptop, smartphone or tablet, to maximize user experience.
• A/B testing: Running a test by creating multiple versions of a page, comparing user behavior to see which page is the most effective.
• Setting custom channels dynamically: Tracking performance of segments of users, sections of your site, or other behavior to maximize ad and user experience.
• Ad tag minification: Enabling your site pages to load faster by reducing the amount of data to be transferred.

For more details and to find the specific code snippets related to the bullets above, visit our updated Help Center article.

Even with this new flexibility, it’s important to proceed with caution to ensure the ecosystem remains balanced for publishers, users and advertisers. Please note that publishers must not make modifications to the AdSense code if those modifications are not permitted by our program policies. Publishers should always use caution when modifying the AdSense code and must not use techniques like hiding ad units, implementing the AdSense code in a way that covers content, creating ‘floating ads’, or manipulating ad targeting as they are a violation of our policies. More information about these types of prohibited techniques can be found in our updated Help Center article. In addition, please be aware that some types of code modification may prevent ads from appearing correctly, which may negatively impact your revenue.

We also look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions on our AdSense +page.

Posted By Nick Radicevic - AdSense Product Manager
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In order to help you better understand our policies, we’ll be holding a series of policy refreshers online in the coming weeks. We’ll discuss the policies we’re asked about most, explain how we enforce them and share tips on how to stay compliant.

In this series, we’ll review:

• Our general policies
• How to keep your content family- safe
• How to ensure your ad placements are policy compliant 

Check the schedule below to sign up for our Hangouts on Air, and look out for more blog posts on AdSense policies in the coming weeks.

View our Hangouts schedule

Posted by Pamela Malone - AdSense Policy Specialist
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In order to keep pace with changes in our products, we regularly review our Terms and Conditions to make sure they're up to date and in line with those of other Google products. As a result of our recent review, we’ll be making some updates to our Terms, starting April 23rd. If you're based in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, or North America, you'll see a notification in your account when you log in after this date. It will present you with the updated Terms and prompt you to accept them. For publishers based in the Asia-Pacific region, the change to our Terms will happen slightly later as we’re rolling the changes out gradually across all regions. 

You'll have 30 days to fully review the new terms in detail before action is required. Before the updated Terms appear in your account, we'd like to give you an idea of what's changing:

• With this new version of the Terms and Conditions, our goal has been to make them as clear and transparent as possible. As a result of this, we hope that it’ll be even easier to navigate and find what you’re looking for.
• With mobile being one of the big trends in 2013 and beyond, we’re expanding our Terms to cover mobile properties more specifically. We’ve also incorporated guidelines for using the AdMob SDK and other publisher products.

The updates outlined above are the main areas that will be affected by the change. However, we’ve made smaller changes throughout, so please be sure to review the Terms as a whole before accepting them.

Posted by Matt Goodridge - AdSense Product Manager

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Playing online games is a common pastime, and many of you implement Flash games on your site to capture your users’ interests. We've received some questions about our policies related to Flash games in the past, so we've posted a couple messages, including Using the right product and Tips for placing ads on game play pages which provide tips on how ads should be implemented. Today we’re talking about content issues on Flash gaming sites as well as common ad implementation violations for Flash gaming sites.

Family safe content
You can monetize Flash games, however our policies do not permit monetizing games with sexual or violent content. It's also important to refrain from including or allowing any explicit or profane language in descriptions or comments.

Distance between ads and game
To reduce the risk of invalid click activity, avoid placing AdSense for content ads too close to the Flash game. We strongly recommend a distance of at least 150 pixels between the ads and the the edge of a game. When users are concentrating on a Flash game and clicking frantically, invalid clicks can occur. Since each game and site is unique, some games may require a greater distance based on the type of game and how it is played. To know whether a game is likely to cause invalid clicks, we recommend that you play your Flash game, placing yourself in the user’s shoes, before placing ads on the page. Clicks on ads should always be motivated by user interest, and not by the placement of the ads on the page.

AFC as pre-roll
AdSense for games (AFG) is a product designed specifically for the monetization of Flash games. Using AdSense for content (AFC) ads as a pre-roll before, or mid-roll during a Flash game, is against our policies, as the product was not created for this kind of an implementation. If you wish to use Google ads as a pre-roll to your game, please apply for AFG. For more information about AFG, please visit our Help Center.

In order for users to enjoy the gaming experience of your site, the Flash game should be the primary focus of the page. Always keep the user in mind when placing ads and your site should remain in good standing from a policy perspective.

Posted by Ben Barkhoff,  AdSense Policy Team
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Since our recent introduction of the new 300x600 ad format, we’ve been happy to see many publishers testing it out on their pages. After carefully reviewing this ad format, we’d like to let you know about an upcoming update to our policies around use of the 300x600 unit.

Because this new format is larger than all our other ad units, we want to help ensure a balance between content and ads across publisher sites. With this in mind, going forward, publishers will be permitted to place a maximum of one 300x600 ad unit on each page. If you’ve placed more than one 300x600 ad unit per page on your site, we ask that you remove any additional ad units by Jan 10, 2013. We’ll also be sending email notifications shortly to affected publishers, asking them to make this update.

Please note that the limit for AdSense for content ad units still remains at three per page, so it’ll be possible to place one 300x600 ad unit and up to two other sizes on a page. As always, it’s important to consider both the user and advertiser experiences when placing any additional ad units on your pages.

We appreciate your understanding and help as we make this update. Thanks again for all of your feedback and enthusiasm for this new ad format; we’re continuing to work on developing new sizes, and will keep you posted on any new developments. If you’d like more information about AdSense policies, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Charles Huang, Policy Associate

Publishers are the lifeblood of the Internet, and we’re committed to helping you grow your businesses. Last year alone, we shared $6.5 billion with our AdSense publishers. We also invest immense amounts of time and millions of dollars in systems (including sophisticated algorithms and human reviews) that keep bad ads from appearing on your sites and prevent advertisers from being fraudulently charged for bad clicks. When everything is working well, advertisers trust our network and continue to invest in it, which generates revenue for you the publisher, ultimately funding the free content users love.

But we’ve also heard the stories: publishers finding their accounts suspended or even disabled for “invalid activity” without a clear understanding of why or how to fix it. We know this can be an intensely frustrating, even scary experience. So why does this happen?

While the vast majority of publishers who sign up for AdSense do so in good faith, unfortunately there are some bad actors out there.  As you can imagine, we can’t reveal all the tools we use to keep bad sites and bad traffic out of our network.  But sometimes these tools result in good publishers who become a source of invalid activity having their accounts disabled without much recourse.  We’re making some changes we think will help fix this:

• We are considering tenure more actively when responding to detected invalid activity. For example, some trusted publishers will now have their accounts suspended instead of terminated, and over time we hope to work directly with more publishers to resolve invalid traffic issues without needing to disable the account at all. (As always, we’ll continue to credit advertisers for any invalid activity.)
• We’ve given publishers tools to submit more informative appeals via a new form, which may help resolve issues more quickly.
• We’re providing more details on invalid activity’s causes. If we’ve detected a violation of our policies you’ll receive an email and a notification to your account with further information and instructions. And you can read all about the causes of invalid activity at our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, which is now available in most languages supported by AdSense, such as German, French, Polish and Arabic.
• Whether you’re looking for a refresher or just creating your first ad unit, you can review the do’s and don'ts of ad traffic in our expanded AdSense Academy. 
• In order to help publishers avoid common pitfalls, we’re kicking off a video series that explains why some of our policies exist and how you can make sure you’re working with them. Our first looks specifically at invalid traffic.

We want to work with our publisher partners to keep the AdSense network strong -- keeping good publishers’ accounts in good standing, while also protecting advertisers and users from fraudulent activity. This is why we’re making changes, like the ones discussed today, to provide more help when things go wrong. We’ll be making even more changes as the year goes on so look for continued updates on this blog.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack - Product Management Director

We want to hear from you. Let’s continue the conversation -- submit your questions to us about the topics discussed in this post via Google Moderator. We’ll be holding a Google Hangout in January with members of our Product Quality Operations team for the first time to address your questions. Please note that for privacy reasons, we won’t be able to respond to account-specific questions.

We’ll soon be updating the application process for new publishers who apply for an AdSense account via a host partner site like Blogger or Hubpages. As you may know, host partner sites allow publishers to create and monetize their content, which is hosted on the partner site rather than the publisher’s own domain. New publishers approved for AdSense accounts via a host partner site will be able to place ads on and earn from policy-compliant content they’ve created on any host partner site. If they then decide to show ads on their own domain, from today onwards they’ll need to complete an extra approval step similar to the application process at www.google.com/adsense. Please note that publishers who were approved for AdSense accounts before today won't be affected by these changes.

Here’s an example to explain the process -- let’s say Sue runs a blog using Blogger. She applies for a hosted AdSense account within Blogger, and once approved, she begins to monetize her blog. If she then launches a second blog on Blogger, she’ll be able to show ads on that second blog and earn from both sites.

Next, let’s imagine Sue decides to purchase her own domain, example.com, and wants to earn from the content she creates there. Before she can do so, she’ll need to complete a form in her account to request a site review. After submitting the form, she’ll need to generate ad code and implement it on a live page of example.com that receives traffic. The implemented ad unit will remain blank until the domain has been reviewed by the AdSense team.

If the request is approved, Sue can proceed with placing additional ad units on the site. If the request is denied, she’ll be unable to show ads on her new domain, but there’ll be no impact to her two existing blogs; she can continue to earn from them, and can also work to resolve the issues with her new domain and resubmit her site for review.

These changes will help ensure a consistent, seamless sign up experience for publishers, whichever application process they follow, while also allowing publishers and host partner sites to continue working together as they have been. We remain committed to building a high-quality network that also provides strong business results for our advertiser partners and a positive experience for users.

Posted by Sophia Lin, Product Manager

The goal of the Google Display Network is to provide valuable and relevant content for our users and advertisers. We’ve previously provided some tips for creating high quality sites for AdSense. To build on that, we’d like to share some more information about which types of sites and pages are best suited for monetization.

Pages should provide originality and added value
The Google Webmaster Guidelines highlight the importance of providing original content that sets your site apart, but this is only one component of creating a high quality website. Our guidelines also recommend, for example, that you do not use doorway pages and doorway domains, pages with little to no content, or pages optimized for specific keywords or phrases.

Strive for well-organized and information-rich content
Providing original content is only one component of creating a high quality website. The content should also be informative and organized in a manner that is easy for users to navigate.

Here is a short - but not exhaustive - list of things you may want to keep in mind:

• Focus on topics you’re knowledgeable and enthusiastic about.
• Avoid duplicating the same content on several pages or producing overlapping or redundant content.
• Focus on engaging the user (i.e., providing an interactive experience with relevant information based on user interests) rather than generating content in the attempt to trick our bots, for instance with irrelevant high-paying keywords.

The organization and navigational structure of your site are also important, as users should be able to easily navigate through your pages and find the information or service they’re seeking. In addition, there should always be a good balance between the ad implementation and the content of your page. Ads should be an additional resource for users, enriching the value of the page and not be overwhelming or more prominent than the content itself.

Avoid placing ads on non-content-based pages
Sometimes websites that provide valuable content as a whole may have certain sections or pages that are not well-suited for monetization. This includes pages that users visit before potentially exiting a domain, such as a page where users are shown a “thank you” message for their visit or purchase. Another example are 404 error pages where users are informed there is no content to be found at that given URL.

We hope you found this helpful. For more information about creating high quality content, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines, AdSense Program policies and the policy section of the AdSense Help Center.

Our best suggestion is to follow what we at Google still maintain as our core principle: “Focus on the users and all else will follow.”

Posted by Francesco Angeli, AdSense Policy team

One of the fantastic benefits of the Internet is that it puts incredible information and entertainment at our fingertips. We can instantly watch videos, listen to music, read news articles and much more. It’s important to remember, however, that these works may be protected by copyright law.

We’d like to take a moment to explain the AdSense policies regarding copyrighted material and provide some tips on how to comply with them.

AdSense policy
It’s against our policies to show ads alongside copyrighted material you don’t have authorization to use. Simply put, you cannot run AdSense ads alongside copyrighted content that violates copyright laws, or alongside links to such content. The program policies go into more detail.

What’s copyrighted?
Generally speaking, any original creative work that appears online is protected by copyright law. There are some exceptions, such as purely factual material, or material that has entered the public domain. But in general the reach of copyright law is very broad.

Do you have the right to use the material?
In most cases, without a specific license or exception, you don’t have the right to offer most mainstream entertainment such as television shows, movies, and popular music on your website.

If you created the content entirely from scratch, chances are you hold the copyright. Generally, you’re free to monetize this kind of content any way you like. If you didn’t create the content, or you created it using other peoples’ content as source material, you should ask yourself if you have a license or if an exception applies.

You may have acquired permission from the copyright holder for the material on your web site. This kind of permission is typically called a license. In this case, as long as your use is in line with the license you have, you should be okay.

There are also exceptions to copyright law that may apply to your use. Fair use in the United States, and other similar exceptions elsewhere, allow for certain kinds of uses of copyrighted material. Common examples are criticism or scholarship. There are other exceptions to copyright law as well.

We don’t want AdSense used in ways that may support copyright violations, so we sometimes err on the side of caution if a site cannot demonstrate a clear legal basis for using or linking to copyrighted material.

Linking to filesharing hosts
It’s against our policies to show ads on the same page as links to other sites that are hosting copyrighted materials without authorization. Keep in mind that these sites come in various forms such as forums, blogs or community websites.

Reporting instances of copyright infringement
If you believe that a site which is participating in the AdSense program is displaying your copyrighted material without the rights to do so, please report it using this form or by clicking on the AdChoices icon. If you’d like to know more information about copyright issues and AdSense, we encourage you to visit our Help Center.

Posted by Ben Barkhoff,  AdSense Policy Team

We receive a lot of questions from publishers wanting to know best practices to grow your businesses with AdSense. While there's no one right answer, our advice continues to be to focus on creating high quality content and delivering the best possible user experience on your websites. Here are some key suggestions on how to design and organize your website content with an overall emphasis on the quality of the site.

Don't create multiple pages or sites with duplicate content.

We encourage you to create high quality sites rather than a large quantity of sites. Focusing on one site and making it richer in information and authentic in content not only benefits users, but also helps you win more of them. When users are browsing online, they want to find what they're looking for quickly and easily without combing through endless multiple pages, subdomains, or sites with substantially generic or duplicate content. If you have pages or sites that are similar in content or template design, consider consolidating the pages or sites into one.

 

Provide content that gives users a reason to visit, and return, to your site. 

When you create content on your site, it’s important to ask yourself if the page provides substantial value or service when compared to sites covering similar subjects. It's worth the effort to create original content that sets your site apart from the rest. This will provide useful search results and keep your visitors coming back.
 

Provide the information or service promised. 

Some publishers create sites that appear to offer a product or service, but instead trick users into navigating through several pages and viewing ads. This results in a negative user experience, and causes your site to be perceived as untrustworthy. Use keywords appropriately and in context with your content and make sure users are able to easily navigate through the site to find what products, goods, or services are promised.

There’s no shortcut to success. Building high quality site takes effort and time. However, we’ve seen that publishers who focus on their users instead of using quick and deceptive techniques are the real winners and experience long-term revenue growth and success in our network. For more information, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines and the policy section of the AdSense Help Center.

Posted by Lingjuan Zhang, AdSense Policy team