I woke up today and checked my sites are up and running (been having hosting issues) and of course logged into my Gmail to find an email from one of my good work-mates pointing to a post at Jensense that details very recent changes to Adsense policies.

Changes were made to:

-Competitive Ads and Services
-Copyright Material
-Selling or distributing student essays
-Domain Parking
-AdSense for Search
-AdSense ad units with images next to them
-Referrals

The most notable ones for me were the changes made to the “Competitive Ads and Services” & “Copyright Material”. Here’s why:

“In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.”

Although this doesn’t directly affect me or force me to make any changes to my current sites, it’s something to take into account when making new sites or purchasing new ones. This basically means that if you’re using YPN, TLA or pretty much any other advertising services they must not look similar to Adsense.

For those living in the U.S. and using YPN, it is essential that you read the fully detailed change here.

“Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”

Now this is one tricky change. Google went from a pretty unclear copyright clause to a very clear, and pretty strict one. While this is excellent news for publishers that are getting their content scrapped by auto-blogs and arbitragers, it places entertainment site owners like me in an awkward position. Not that i put any copyrighted content there without crediting the source, but think about the huge amount of media put in these sites and how much time it would take to audit it.

I already gave my 2 cents on these policy changes exactly a month ago when several accounts reported audited Adsense earnings:

“It seems like Google is tightening the ring around the average publisher’s neck as time passes by. Some real competition has to get into this market before the monopoly is too dominant.”