Best Practices to avoid policy violations

We’re dedicated to providing additional transparency into our policy processes and hope that the recent blog posts have helped you understand specific policy triggers and the actions to take if you’ve violated a policy.  To further help you stay policy compliant, here’re 8 best practices to help avoid policy violations and keep your account in good standing.

1. Don’t click on your own ads

Don’t click your own ads, or ask others to click them. These kinds of clicks won’t count toward revenue and may get you suspended. Even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL, clicking on your own ads is prohibited. Instead, use the Google Publisher Toolbar.

2. Think like a user 

Make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. Follow the Webmaster Guidelines to provide content that’s useful, interesting, and adds value. Immerse yourself into the user experience however you can. Try to discover the emotions that guide users’ behaviors and try to uncover their needs. 

3. Keep it family-friendly and legal Review our guidelines about prohibited content and be sure you understand them. If you wouldn’t want a child or grandparent to see it, don’t put it on your site. We’ve made a commitment to our users, advertisers and publishers to keep the AdSense network family-safe. A general rule of thumb when it comes to our policies is: if you wouldn’t want to share this content at a family dinner, or view it at your boss’s office, you shouldn’t place AdSense code on it.

4. Maximize content, not ads per page Create new, relevant, interesting content, and update it regularly. Also, be sure to maintain a good balance between ads and editorial content as it’s important to ensure that there’s always more content than ads on a page.

5. Avoid deceptive layoutsKeep ads away from games, slideshows, and other click-heavy content and don’t place them near images. Publishers may not use deceptive implementation methods to obtain clicks. This includes, but is not limited to: placing images next to individual ads, placing ads in a floating box script, formatting ads so that they become indistinguishable from other content on the page, formatting content so that it is difficult to distinguish it from ads and placing misleading labels above Google ad units.

6. Create unique content Your content needs to create added value for your users. Focus on making content great – not duplicating it across pages. Unique and valuable content is what keeps users coming back to publisher sites. Everything you do as a publisher should be user focused, which primarily includes developing great content.

7. Track your traffic Your traffic should be organic. Set up alerts using Google Analytics to quickly identify unusual traffic patterns. Many potential traffic quality problems can be addressed quickly by monitoring your own traffic. Traffic anomalies are often indicators of potential invalid traffic activity.

8. Follow the Code of Implementation GuideAlways follow the Code Implementation Guide and don’t try to modify the AdSense code. If you run into a problem, visit the Troubleshooting page or contact publisher support.

Thanks for taking the time to learn about Google ad network policy, processes, and best practices. Together, we can continue to make the web and advertising experience great.

Posted by: Anastasia Almiasheva from the AdSense team