JenSense

If you haven’t chosen to select your font style within your account because you were happy with the default, you might want to rethink that.  AdSense is changing the default font used in the different ad units, based on which ad font performs best in each ad unit.  The new defaults will be:

Arial: 728×90, 336×280, 120×600, 120×240
Verdana: 300×250, 160×600, 468×60, 250×250, 234×60, 125×125, 180×150
Times New Roman: 200×200

This will go live within the next couple of days, so you will have a bit of time before the new fonts come into play, incase you want to double check what your default fonts are.

If you were one of the publishers who discovered two AdSense checks in your mailbox instead of the usual one, don’t get too excited, the AdSense fairy didn’t suddenly decide your website was so awesome it was worthy double the amount of expected earnings.  An error with the bank that processes checks printed and mailed duplicate checks to some Google AdSense publishers (including me!)

It seems the problem is isolated to Canadian publishers (or at least no non-Canadian publishers have reported it yet).  But because the checks are exact duplicates, the bank will (unfortunately!) only honor one of them.  Some publishers received both checks in a single envelope, while others received them in two separate envelopes, as much as a week apart.

Here is the email sent to affected publishers.

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know about an issue with your July AdSense
payment. Due to a Citibank processing error, we recently mailed you a
duplicate AdSense check.

Because Citibank only honors the deposit of checks with unique check
numbers, you’ll only be able to successfully deposit one of these checks.
Please destroy the other check.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused. To help
ensure smooth payment processing in the future, we recommend that you sign
up for Electronics Funds Transfer (EFT).  You can learn more about this
form of payment at
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=15918 .

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Although one publisher did have a much better idea than simply destroying it, Lame_wolf suggests framing it!

Forum discussion at Webmasterworld and Digital Point.

After uniQlicks began spamming AdSense publishers with fake Google AdSense termination emails in an attempt to scare publishers into signing up for their “invalid click protection”, a lot of people asked me what they can do themselves to protect their AdSense account.  The AdSense team contacted me and said they have a list of tips for publishers, and yes, they are all free  

It is also worth noting that they do not recommend using any third party software or custom ad implementations.

Here are the tips from the AdSense team:

We’ve provided some points below to help address and clarify some invalid clicks issues:

• We understand that it’s not always possible to control the behavior of your users, but you can be proactive about monitoring your traffic, and you can take steps to ensure that your site provides a helpful and safe environment for users and advertisers. Here are some top tips for keeping your account in good standing (which you may have seen before): https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23921
   
• Expanding on the tip “Be aware of how your site is promoted.”, we’d like to remind you that, should you purchase traffic to promote your site, you do so at your own risk. There are many site promotion services out there that appear to be legitimate PPC advertising companies or search engines, but actually may be sending artificial traffic to your site for their own gain. (For legal reasons, we’re not allowed to disclose the names of such services.)To combat this, we highly recommend that you use channels to segment your traffic by source (e.g. a channel for your site’s Google AdWords traffic only). If one channel’s reports look particularly suspicious, you may want to consider unsubscribing from that traffic service. We also recommend using Analytics to slice and dice your traffic reports further to ensure that you’re receiving clicks from users who are genuinely interested in your ads. 
• Though we encourage you to be proactive about monitoring your site and ad traffic, we highly discourage the use of click tracking via third-party software or custom ad implementations. These methods may:
  • inadvertently disclose sensitive information about you or your site to a third-party
  • disrupt Google’s ad delivery or click logging in a way that violates our Terms and Conditions

In addition, click tracking may not provide you with significantly more information than you can already find in your AdSense or Analytics reports. We believe that the creative use of channels can help you gain detailed insights into your account.

• If you see unusual activity on your account, feel free to submit this form to let us know: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact Please note that we will only respond if we find a significant issue with your account.
• Invalid clicks can come from many sources, as described at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=16737. While we’re unable to go into the details of our monitoring system, you should know that invalid clicks don’t always mean clicking on your own ads or using click bots. Our Ad Traffic Quality Team looks for numerous types of activity that may inflate advertiser costs, then takes the necessary actions to protect our advertisers.
• That said, we still find that many publishers are clicking on their own ads, possibly because they feel that Google is disregarding those clicks. Keep in mind that even though we filter the revenue from an invalid click, we don’t ignore it completely. If we detect significant invalid activity on your AdSense ads, we may take action on your account to protect our advertisers from inflated costs. Here are some examples of situations in which clicking your own ads is prohibited:
  • Clicking out of interest in the ad content
  • Clicking to see an ad’s destination URL, such as for filtering purposes (we recommend trying the AdSense Preview Tool, available at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10005)
  • Clicking to ensure that Google is properly registering clicks on your ads (we log all ad clicks, but it can sometimes take up to 24 hours before your reports are finalized)
  • Clicking to test your website
• For general invalid click questions, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8426
• For questions about AdSense accounts disabled for invalid clicks, you can find more information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153

Followup from Jen: Anyone have any additional tips they use to protect their accounts?  I think this pretty much covers most of what I do or advise clients to do in order to protect their AdSense accounts.  The most important tip, in my opinion, is the one about being cautious when buying traffic (well, aside from the obvious one of never clicking your own ads!)  Too many people get tempted with offers of cheap traffic, but always keep in mind you will never be sure if the traffic is legitimate or artificial.  So while you are pretty safe buying PPC ads on Google, Yahoo and Bing/adCenter, definitely avoid third tier networks where you cannot judge the traffic quality first.  Anyone had any horror stories with buying bad traffic? 

And thank you to Google for providing this!

It is probably the worst feeling for a publisher… checking your email only to discover a “Google AdSense Account Disabled” email from Google.  That is what happened to an AdSense publisher Steve this morning (and presumably to others as well)… and it turns out that it was a fake termination letter done by a company that sells invalid click prevention services.  And even worse, the company – uniQlicks – used a Google.com address as the From address, to fool even more publishers into thinking they’ve been terminated. If you haven’t received one, I am sure you can imagine your reaction thinking your account has been terminated, only to discover it is a bait and switch technique designed to sell their service to “protect” your AdSense account.

The company using this sleazy spam scare tactic is uniQlicks, a company that has been popping up recently with a bunch of paid blog posts / “guest blog posts” on a variety of making money online blogs.

Here is the complete letter Steve received this morning, with a subject line of “Google AdSense Account Disabled”:

From: Google AdSense [mailto:adsense-adclicks-noreply@google.com]
Sent: June-17-09 7:31 AM
To: info@example.com (publisher prefers to remain anonymous)
Subject: Google AdSense Account Disabled

Hello,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our
advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the
interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We
realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance
for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we’ve taken,
please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by
visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Our apologies for scaring you. Your AdSense account is 
fine, and we are not affiliated in any way with Google. 

But the above email could very well land in your inbox
one day – this time sent not by us, but by Google.

We checked out your cool <keyword> <keyword> resource.
<2 keyword specifics removed as per Steve’s request>

You are using AdSense, but apparently haven’t installed
any script to protect your site from invalid clicks.

This means that your AdSense account is at risk of
termination due to invalid clicks. AdSense bans are for
life, so your income would be wiped out forever.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can help
safeguard your site and your AdSense income from
invalid clicks. A basic account is free, why not try
it out?

   http://www.uniQlicks.com/

Again, I’m sorry if I shocked you with this email. No
harm was intended. Our job is to help protect
livelihoods – and sometimes extreme measures are needed
to do just that.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.
I look forward to hearing from you!

Valerie Kryie
Sales Manager

uniQlicks
http://www.uniQlicks.com/

So not only is uniQlicks sending unsolicited spam, they are doing it by impersonating Google as well.  You have to wonder how many publishers don’t even bother reading down past what appears to be the end of the email to actually get the message as well.  There have been some phishing click fraud warning emails sent out recently, but nothing to the effect where it was done by a company selling services.

This particular email was not send to the same email address associated with Steve’s AdSense account, so it is clearly not in any way associated with AdSense.

So if you receive an AdSense suspended email, first scroll to the end to make sure it isn’t a uniQlicks spam email.  Second, go to login to your AdSense account, but by entering in the address manually – NEVER click the link from an email in case it is a phishing attempt.  If your account is suspended, you will NOT be able to login to your account.   Or you can check ad serving on any of your sites, if ads are running normally, there isn’t a problem with an account being suspended.

I would also NOT RECOMMEND using uniQlicks, since this is the type of spam scare tactics they are using on publishers.  If unsolicited spam sent from “Google” with this kind of message is how they promote their company and service, you have to wonder if their invalid click protection is just as bad.

Update: Daniel Tsieh of UniQlicks has posted a comment claiming the emails aren’t spam since they are sent to a publisher’s site they visit (obviously a different definition of spam than the rest of us have!) and defends the “shock tactic” of sending an email impersonating Google AdSense.  You can read my response below  it.  I would have expected to hear an apology or a “my bad”, instead of accusing publishers for not using their services since many were scared by the email.  And not surprisingly, I still will not recommend it.

Update 2: Daniel from uniQlicks responds again, this time insulting bloggers, who make up a good portion of his target customer base.

I have been on the road for most of the last two weeks, so I have been getting current events news on both CNN.com and Google News, particularly about the Air France plane crash.  A couple of days ago I noticed Google News was now embedding videos from (what I believe are) “trusted video news sources”, such as the Associated Press.  If you see a tiny YouTube icon, you click the news link, and the video pops up underneath and begins playing.  Sunday morning I noticed that one of the news videos about the Air France plane crash was showing ads for a travel site, which popped up overlaying the bottom of the video, after the video ran for about 15-3o seconds.

Inappropriate?  Yes, it is a plane crash and people are sensitive to the issue.  As an advertiser?  Well, I can’t speak for all advertisers, but I am pretty sure most would be extremely ticked off to discover their advertisement for a travel site were showing up on a video about a major air disaster.

Here are screenshots from Google News showing the ads on the disaster videos, the first advertising charter flights, the second advertising a Brazil photo gallery, targeted since the flight took off from Brazil.  Click each for the full size version.

Now, it has been a week since the Air France crash, why hasn’t Google added that phrase to a stop word filter on YouTube when showing through Google News, similar to the AdSense stop word filter (which words pretty well).  And it isn’t exclusive just to the Air France disaster either.  Other world current events with human tragedy have also been showing inappropriate ads as well.

In my mind, news videos that have anything to do with disasters, loss of life, terrorism, etc, should never show ads… PERIOD.  It doesn’t take much to know that inappropriate ads will appear on these videos.  And since many do seem targeted, such as the Brazil photo gallery ad on the Air France crash video and solar panels on the collapsed roof explosion, why isn’t it being stopped?  And for that matter, why don’t these video uploaders – particularly the major news organizations – have the ability to click a button or check off a checkbox stating that the video contains content that might be disturbing or upsetting to others, and that advertising should not be displayed.

Perhaps when they launched this feature, no one thought about the fact that both viewers and advertisers might be offended by ads overlaying on inappropriate videos.  It is far better for Google to lose a bit of income with an over-excessive stop word filter (one that would trigger for any news stories featuring words such as bomb, crash, kills, deaths, explosion, terrorism, etc).  But in my opinion, there is no excuse for this kind of situation to be happening period, especially when shown on Google News, and particularly when they want to be considered a trusted source of news information.

With the new AdSense policies that were released last week, there was definitely some confusion about what would and wouldn’t be allowed, particularly to do with blending ads. I have gotten some clarification from Katie from the Google AdSense team on some of the policies that has people confused.

First, if you haven’t read about the new policies, you should read the full AdSense policies update I did here, which also has full commentaries on each of the new changes that Google made.

Now, onto the clarification from Google:

On the “Enouraging Clicks” section of the new policies, Google added the following to the “Publisher may not…” part:

Format ads so that they become indistinguishable from other content on that page.

Format site content so that it is difficult to distinguish it from ads.

So that raised my questions about just how “blended” would be considered too much for Google and thus be in violation of the AdSense terms. So here is Google’s response:

I also understand you wanted some clarification on blending. I can assure you that all of our optimization tips are still valid, such as embedding your ad units within text and blending your ad colors. However, there’s a distinction between formatting the ads to fit your site and tricking users into thinking that the ads are your site’s content. For example, it’s OK to make the ad links match the color of the other links on your site, but it may be confusing if the ads are surrounded by lots of similar looking
links and there is no distinction between the two. (You can see an example of this here.)

The intent of this policy is to protect advertisers from accidental clicks made by users who are unable to distinguish the Google ads from other content on the page. We also want to make sure that our publishers are providing a good user experience with Google ads. If publishers would like additional guidance, they can look at this blog post and our Help Center entry regarding best practices for laying out their sites and ads.

So this clears up a lot of the confusion that many publishers were having about the blending issue. AdSense has actually been sending compliancy warnings to publishers doing this kind of thing for quite some time, so in this respect it is nothing new and is similar to Google giving warnings to those publishers using images next to ad units.

Next was the change in the Google Webmaster Guidelines section which included:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Now, we all know that there are completely legitimate uses for hidden text, although they are most often used for far more devious purposes. But there was the concern that those publishers using the technique for legit reasons could end up getting a compliancy warning over this. Here is Google’s response:

It also looks like you had a question about hidden text and hidden links (from the webmaster quality guidelines section). To clarify, this refers to any text or links that are solely for search engines rather than for visitors. As such, the spoiler TV site example would not be in violation of this, since that design is intended for the visitors.

So as long as a publisher is using hidden text or links for purely legitimate reasons, and not to trick search engines for example, publishers do not need to worry about running afoul of this one.

Lastly, there was an addition to the Ad Placement section, which saw this added:

Google ads, search boxes, or search results may not be:

• Placed on pages whose content or URL could confuse users into thinking it is associated with Google due to the misuse of logos, trademarks, or other brand features.
• Placed on, within, or alongside other Google products or services in a manner that violates the policies of that product or service.

Now, for sometime I have heard from publishers who had “AdSense” included in their site’s domain name who have had ad serving turned off on those accounts, and there were likely others as well using other Google trademarks who ran into this same issue. But this policy kind of brought everything into line. Of course, that could be interpreted many different ways, including whether this blog is in violation because the term Google AdSense is used on the page and in the URLs. Here is Google’s clarification on the new brand changes.

Lastly, in regards to the use of Google Brand Features, what we’re primarily concerned with are sites that use a Google Brand Feature as the most prominent element on the web page, or sites that display a Google Brand Feature in any manner that implies a relationship or affiliation with, sponsorship, or endorsement by Google. That said, mentions of the word “Google” in a blog post, article, etc, are fine, as is any Google branding that is naturally associated with our Google products.

And lastly, I commented on the fact that the policies were missing the time stamp, making it pretty difficult for publishers to be aware if there were any changes made, something publishers are required to check regularly. But fortunately (especially for me) this will be added back onto the policies page.

First, thanks for pointing out that the date stamp is missing from the bottom of the program policies. We do usually include this information, and we’re working on adding it back in.

This should help clear up some of the confusion last week surrounding the new policies Google introduced. What does everyone think about the new blending clarification? Now, it isn’t really that big of a deal for most publishers and most won’t be affected. And nice to know the blending technique that I (along with many other publishers!) have perfected will be perfectly within the new AdSense policies.

Note: This blog post was corrupted in the database and was reposted, please see archive.org for original comments.