SEO Now Issue 46 - Google Adsense Policy Changes

Google AdSense Policy Changes

Google has now forbid AdSense publishers from placing images alongside their ad units.

The practice, which has been proven to increase ad click rates, is no longer allowed.

Advertisers may not draw attention to the ads using images or use misleading images alongside the ads where they might get confused with the ads themselves.

While that change will likely affect a lot of publishers, another big change is this:

To prevent user confusion, Google no longer allows ads or search boxes to be published on web sites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as Google Ads.

Although ads may be sold directly on a site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google Ads.

Hence you cannot put ads that even remotely resemble the look of your AdSense ads on the same page you're using AdSense on.

This includes the rotating of ads between AdWords and other ad networks such as Yahoo Publisher Network.

Ads must look substantially different since Google does not want a user to mistake other Ad networks for Google Ads.

Yahoo Search Marketing Panama Rollout Continues

Yahoo continues the roll-out of their new Panama Advertising Platform getting ready for the big push to all of their customers in February.

Yahoo Ad Quality Ranking Soon

Yahoo has announced a new Ad Quality scoring along with Bid Amount to determine an ad's rank. The new system is scheduled to go into effect in February and will adopt a ranking methodology similar to Google's Quality Score, in which ad quality effects how high the ad ranks in the paid search results.

According to Yahoo, Ad Quality is defined by:

The ad's historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors -
normalized for position.

There is no mention of landing page content or quality, which will please advertisers. Other factors that will alter are that standard match type ads will no longer receive priority placement over Advanced match type ads.

You can read more about the new quality index system at Yahoo Search Marketing.

Yahoo Opens Sitemap

Yahoo now allows the submission of a sitemap.xml file, similar to Google.

Yahoo Wildcard Robots

Yahoo now supports wildcards in robots.txt file.

This allows Yahoo's robot Slurp to recognize two new symbols, * and $.

The asterisk, *, means you can prevent Yahoo from indexing any URL’s which contain the text you specify.

The dollar-sign, $, at the end of a URL string means Yahoo should not index URLs
ending with a certain string of text.