Several weeks ago a several Adsense publisher has complains about recent modifications in the click behavior for Adsense ads. While an Internet visitor was able before to click the whole ad area to reach the target page, is the new ad only clickable on the ad title and the URL. This modification was done by Google to ban unwanted clicks for their advertisers. Afterwards I think that most of the publisher doesn’t have noticed a change in their earnings (maybe a publisher who need those unwanted clicks to earn money).

Enough about this, there are new features!

Managing Ads via the Adsense control panel

Since a few days it’s possible to use this great feature to maintain existing ad code without changing your HTML. Just create a first (new) ad zone and place some standard Adsense code into your HTML (yeah I’m talking about an account from a publisher in Europe). If you need to change the colors, ad dimensions or ad channel on a later moment, just do it within your Adsense control panel. This is really a time safer! This way it’s easy to change for example the color for multiple pages from your website with just a few mouse clicks.

Ad container with dynamic controls

Maybe some of you have already noticed these new type of ads:

• Ad banners with the more or related links to show the “other” ads
• smaller ad boxes with a dynamic “flashy scroller” to show more ads without reloading the page
• … and maybe there are more?

Sure this feature is only useful for AD-surfer (I hope there are some of them) and maybe this new links/navigation elements makes some people curious.

Video units? And why not (ad free) YouTube Videos?

A few weeks ago the Video ad format was added to my Adsense account, I played with it for a while but skipped this format for the next time.

How does it work? People can watch the videos within the theme you have selected for your video ad and MAYBE the visitor will click some (tiny) ad which is placed above/below the movie and YOU (the publisher) became rich.
Sorry, but these ads make no sense (to me), the video player is really big and will take on some of my websites ~50% from the content space. All this afford to have (maybe) some clicks from a banner with one or two small ads? This clicks need to be very high priced because they could give your website the imago from some MFA site.

Get targeted ads on your site with Google AdSense

People from Adsense thanks for the “Manage ads” feature, I like to see more of them!

Any web developer knows it:

Create websites according the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines!

 

If you read the current blog post from Google Webmaster Central these Guidelines are not changed. Only the help pages are extended and give more information about each rule.

About the rule “Hidden text and links” there is the following information available:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including: Using white text on a white background, Including text behind an image, Using CSS to hide text, Setting the font size to 0

 

I know a lot of modern Ajax/JavaScript function are using some text which is hidden by CSS (display:hidden) and upon some event this text (content) becomes visible. This is not some of “Black hat SEO” but just using some JavaScript behavior to create nice and modern effects on a web page.

OK, I didn’t any site which is blacklisted from Google because of this kind of “violation” against the Google quality guidelines but what this clarified rules are the beginning of some new strategy to punish more websites? Remember that bigger sites like from BMW or TemplateMonster got banned because of violating the Google guidelines a few years ago. So what happens next?