AdSense Basic: Ten AdSense Dont's

Recently, I've registered to Google AdSense program. I'm still newbie in this field. I was looking around for a good book about Google AdSense program. Because I'm newbie, so, I choose 'Google AdSense for Dummies'. LOL.
Because so many time I read that AdSense is very strict, I decided to read what should I don't do in this business. From the mentioned above, I take "Ten AdSense Dont's" as my first reading material. I post here the summary that I hope could help some newbies like myself.

What follows is a list of the top-ten practices that you should avoid when creating your Web site and implementing your AdSense ads. Somewhere along the line someone likely told you that you should try one of the practices listed here.

Don’t Build Your Web Site for AdSense
When you build the site exclusively for AdSense, you’re also in the position of being banned from the AdSense program. Google wants visitors to click ads. Your job, as someone who publishes AdSense ads, is to ensure that AdSense ads are displayed to as many potential clicks — that would be visitors — as possible. That means putting visitors first, always.

Don’t Cut Corners
This rule is sort of a fall-back to don’t build your site for AdSense. When you cut corners on your site, you take out all the elements that make people want to visit the site. For example, cutting a corner would be using the same tired articles that many other Web site owners are also using. Don’t do it. Users quickly figure out that your site doesn’t contain quality content, and they’ll move on to the next site.

Don’t Hide Your Ads
I know it sounds crazy, but some people do hide their ads. What they do is hide the text of the ad, leaving only the URL visible in an attempt to make visitors think that the URL is part of a list of links or a blog roll — the list of links to other blogs that you (as a blog owner) recommend. Do I need to tell you that Google frowns on this practice?
If you intend to show AdSense ads on your Web site, let them be seen. You can blend them with the other text on the page or even make the backgrounds the same color as your page background. Don’t hide the text leaving only the link visible. It might garner you a few clicks in the beginning, but the end results could be disastrous.


Don’t Click Your Own Ads
Of all the no-nos you hear about AdSense, this is the most important one. Don’t click your own ads. Clicking your own ads might seem like just the thing to do. After all, you don’t want ads on your site that you don’t know where they lead, and it wouldn’t hurt to bump your income just a touch.
Hold it just a minute! That’s completely the wrong way to think about it. If everyone could just click their own ads and run up their profits, life would indeed be grand, but clicking your own ads is a form of click fraud. Click fraud is when you fraudulently drive up the number of ad clicks from people (yourself included) who aren’t actually interested in whatever the ad promises.

Don’t Change the AdSense Code
This one is right up there with the AdSense Don’t in the preceding section. Don’t change the AdSense code. Google takes creating AdSense code very seriously. Although a program generates the code for your Web site, that program is constantly tweaked and improved (just like everything Google). The code AdSense generates for you is exactly what Google needs to provide the ads that will appear on your Web page as well as to track the results to
those ads, which are important factors.

Don’t Use Clickbots
Remember click fraud from a few paragraphs ago? Clickbots are another way to commit click fraud. A clickbot is a script or program that’s designed to click the ads on your page, and they’re readily available on the Web, usually inexpensively.
Just because clickbots are there doesn’t mean you should use them, though. Clickbots do the same thing that you’d do if you were clicking your own ads, except on a much larger scale. They inflate the revenue that’s generated without increasing the interest in the product or service that’s being advertised.
Now, a common misconception is that people only use clickbots to click their own ads — not true. Some people have been caught using clickbots to click other people’s ads, too. These people are usually AdWords advertisers who are trying to push their competition out of the way.
Clickbots form a vicious cycle that can be very costly for the person or company that falls victim to this type of click fraud. If you’re the one committing it, both AdSense and AdWords will ban you from their programs.

Don’t Get Banned for Taboo Content
Taboo content — content that Google’s deemed inappropriate for all audiences — is another way to end up on the bad side of AdSense. Examples include content that refers to

    * Certain weapons, including guns
    * Illegal drugs
    * Alcohol
    * Tobacco
    * Pornography
    * Designer knock-offs


If your Web site contains these types of content, AdSense doesn’t want ads displayed on it for one simple reason — image. Google, AdWords, AdSense, and all the other arms of Google have an image to uphold. Placing ads for goods or services on inappropriate sites isn’t the way to do that.

Don’t Hold Clicking Contests
Here’s another facet of click fraud. Clicking contests are conducted when someone who publishes AdSense ads creates a contest for which site visitors must click an ad to qualify. The contest is usually monitored with a secondary script that the Web site owner creates. This artificially inflates the number of clicks that you receive on your AdSense ads, driving up the revenues that your site generates. This is bad for two reasons.
First, you’re creating an artificial bump in revenues. That means to maintain that level of revenue, you have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get people to click your AdSense ads until you’ve reached the point of outright fraud. Never good.
Second, artificially inflating the number of times that someone clicks one of your ads causes the system to be skewed on the Google side, too. The advertisers have to pay more for advertising. Even more troublesome though is that your site could be taken as a site that generates a lot of traffic and so might benefit from a cost-per-impression ad.

Don’t Pay Others to Click Your Ads
Here’s another one that falls into the same category as not using clickbots or holding clicking contests. Don’t pay other people to click your ads. These kinds of programs are sometimes billed as affiliate programs. People who put them together offer a portion of their revenues to a person or group of people who in turn click their AdSense ads. That’s all great, and it might even work for a little while, but eventually someone will squeal or Google will catch on.

Don’t Use Any Other Underhanded Methods
It’s much smarter to avoid anything that seems less than honest. I talk about some of the methods that you might see recommended — but that you should never try — in the list here:

    * Cloaking: By putting one set of content in front of a search engine crawler and then presenting users with another set of content, cloaking deceives potential site visitors into believing they’re entering one type of site when in fact they’re entering another.
    * Duplicate content: No one wants to see the same boring stuff all over again — just like no one wants to watch reruns on TV — which is why I’m always recommending that you use as much unique, fresh content as you can generate, rather than loading up your site with content found elsewhere.
    * Hidden text: This is yet another “helpful hint” you may have suggested to you in the context of improving the AdSense ads that appear on your site. Hidden text involves text that, while present on your site, is colored the same as the background so that it blends into the site and isn’t seen by site visitors — only Web crawlers can read the text.
    * Spreading malware: Malware involves applications that are created specifically for some malicious intent. These days, most malware is created to help the process of identity theft. It’s not at all uncommon for criminals to pay Web site owners to spread malware, even though it’s not exactly a nice thing to do. If you’re distributing that malware on your Web site, Google wants no part of your activities.
    * Using false tactics: Any kind of false tactics that you might employ to trick users into clicking your AdSense ads is forbidden. I know, when you’re looking at click revenues of pennies a day, a lot of different strategies look appealing — especially if they increase the amount of money that you’re making.

Resources : Achmad Z's Archives