AdSense updates their Program Policies, and backdates it two months

May 12, 2006

I was over at Matt Cutts’ blog reading his entry about the fact the Google webmaster quality guidelines had been updated and nobody noticed. So that prompted me to check the Google AdSense Policies, as I do every day or two, because AdSense has a sneaky way of updating their policies without telling anyone… sometimes I am sure they are testing to see if I am paying attention
But lo and behold, sure enough they had been updated. But since I use the updated date at the bottom to check and see if they have changed or not, I noticed right away that the date was changed not to May 12, 2006, but rather to March 14, 2006. And just in case you are thinking I might not have been paying attention, the Google cache dated May 8, 2006 also shows the old version of the Program Policies (October 25, 2005). What is the significance of March 14th? I am not sure, nothing shows up on either my own blog or the AdSense blog on or near that date.

So, with the date discrepancy out of the way, what exactly changed? Interestingly, just a single change was made to the AdSense Policies this time around.

Under Ad Placement, the part in bolded italics was added to this point:

A single referral button per product may be placed on a page up to a maximum of 4 buttons, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above. Referral buttons are considered to be

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Posted in Google AdSense