Check out the placement on my forum, is this cheating my users?

Sneaky way to get people to click on adsense, thinking it is a forum.
Am sure at some point google will do something.

 

According to the ToS, the only labels you can place above an AdSense block are "sponsored links" and "advertisements". Technically speaking, you are "labeling" the AdSense block with 'Forum'. There's also a gap between the label and the AdSense block, so it's somewhat of a grey area - but it would be too grey for my comfort. I'd get in touch with Google and get their thoughts - better to make a minor change than to get banned...

Sam

 

The way you are talking the banner is labling the adsense, there are rows between the text and even different colors. I see adsense Inside forums/posts all the time. Adsense team haven't got back to me but i think it'll be ok'd. They even say in the help you can put adsense in forums particularly "inside".

 

Hello Clark,

Thanks for your email. I've reviewed your site,
http://www.fashion-forums.com/index.php and found that the ad placement is
compliant with our program policies.

To increase the success of Google ads on your site, we recommend
experimenting with different ad formats and colors to find those that your
users are most responsive to. In addition, the position of ads on your
pages can increase the visibility and clickthrough rate of your ads.

In order to determine the best ad options for your site, we recommend
using channels to compare the performance of different ad formats, colors,
and positions. For more helpful optimization tips for forums, we encourage
you to visit:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10...ceid=ASO&subid=us_en-link-opttips&medium=link.

For additional questions, we suggest you visit our AdSense Support site at
https://www.google.com/support/adsense . If you're unable to find an
answer to your question on our site, please feel free to reply to this
email.

Sincerely,

Becky
The Google AdSense Team

----------------
To access the Google AdSense home page or to log in to your account,
please visit: https://www.google.com/adsense



Original Message Follows:
------------------------
From: <fashion@fashion-forums.com>
Subject: Hello Adsense Team
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:56:33 +0100

Hello adsense team,

I have recently added another ad unit to a page on my forum and i was
advised to ask if this unit placement is ok? The url is
http://www.fashion-forums.com/index.php .

Thanks
Clark
Fashion-Forums.com

 

Big G Ok'd my layout, everyone say Yas!

 

Yas! I'm guessing you'll have a very high CTR with that layout.

 

Cool! Does anyone know which template to edit in vbulletin?

Thanks.

 

wow fink! it looks nice and in my opinion your doing great...

 

My ideas on why this will not work.
A forum is sticky. The same users visit again and again. So if most of your users will be amused only once and you can expect them not to repeat the mistake. Sooon ad blindness sets in for the registered users, they wont even see the ads there. But most importantly your users will consider it cheating.
And sorry if I sounded harsh.

 

BTW what is the mail adress to contact goog about adsense?

 

Yea i was a bit concerned about my users thinking about this. I was thinking about taking it away earlier, think i'll wait and see how it goes.

 

good looking site!
check mine out and go to a post; you'll find an example how I intigrated a banner after every 1st post on the forum.

 

Fantastic! I would suggest leaving out the fake post counts, though, the way you have it now. Good luck, dude.

 

doesn't google encourage blended ads? Mine Are!

 

I have an 8.11 click through rate on that unit, i love my self, and google too

 

I just added this to my vbulletin forum.

Here's the link if anyone wants to take a look:

http://www.defend.net/deluxeforums/

Will be interesting to see how it does.

Tim

 

Let us know how that add does.

 

if my suggestions help tell me...

 

Hey, Tim, you seem to have a very active forum. Ever considered putting a CPM banner in there instead of Adsense?

 

Yeah, it's real active. Last month defend.net got 274,370 visits. I just applied to Tribal, Casale and Fastclick as you suggested in another thread.

Just last month I got an offer from someone wanting to buy my website. That inspired me to start looking into making more money off the site...so I started by adding adsense, but I'm open to anything that will produce the $$$!

Thanks,

Tim