Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My site currently offers blogging services to registered members and I have recently been toying with the idea of allowing members to place their own single AdSense unit in their blogs rather than the default ads from my AdSense account. Having done a few searches on the Adsense forums, I found the following posting which seems to indicate that this does not violate Google TOS:
[google.com...]
The problem is that this is just a post from an Adsense user and not an authoritative source, so I do not know if the information posted is actually correct. So the first question is, can anybody confirm if the post above is correct and maybe point me in the direction of an authoritative page on Google.
The second question, which I haven't been able to find any information on, is:
Lets assume that adding member AdSense to blog pages is valid and I run with the idea. Now lets say that 6 months from now Google discovers that a member is clicking their own adverts, rallying for people to click their adverts or otherwise breaking TOS. Obviously these violations will result in the members account will be terminated, however will this also result in other (innocent) accounts, that are associated with the site, also being closed?
I would hate for my members or me to lose our accounts because of one rogue element.
Assuming that I can run with the idea and assuming that a single rogue element won't ruin the party for everybody, the final question is:
For styling reasons I would like to restrict the ad unit type to a 728x90 leaderboard, also for security reasons and to prevent somebody submitting incorrect/breaking markup, I do not want to allow members to submit the full adsense code block. So I am currently working under the assumption that all I need members to supply is the publisher id (google_ad_client). In my testing this seems to work and an ad is render, and I assume that any click is assigned to the publisher id. However it would be nice if users could track how many clicks their ad receives and I think that this will need them to also supply and ad slot id (google_ad_slot). So the question is what elements of the Adsense code markup will members have to provide the site with?
So there you have it, somewhat rambling, hopefully somebody can help me out.
If I was Google I would ban the entire site. Because if I didn't then possibly the rogue element might link up with one of the other account holders and .....
[webmasterworld.com...]
The primary rule is that you do not mix and match client IDs on ad units on a single served page. You can have a different ID on the search box however according to what support told me.
Someplace else it was posted that they do flag sites as revenue sharing, and the association between accounts is not as tight as in other cases of "related accounts". All the same, I don't open up revenue sharing to all users, only those that I specifically approve of.
That is what I would have thought however as BigDave points out "revenue sharing" is something that occurs on quite a few sites. However I obviously do not want the entire site and all associated accounts to be canned because of a single rogue element. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any Google FAQ item that specifically states the "rules" & "policies" for this subject and no authoritative person is replying to this question on the Google AdSense forums.
@BigDave
That is good news...
as you mentioned I do not intend to mix banners on the blog pages for a specific user, so the blog for UserX would only have banners fro UserX and nobody else.
@Anybody who is listening
I could really do with confirmation from Google, as mentioned above I have posted on the AdSense forums and not received a reply and unfortunately the AdSense support email is, shall we say, somewhat difficult to obtain. So does anybody know of a way of contacting Google for final and authoritative information.
