The Most Common Ways to Break a Google AdSense Ad
When your website marketing strategy has ad revenue as the end goal, you have to expect that the game isn’t going to be as easy as you at first think it will be. Ad revenue is a very thin margin even in the best of scenarios. It takes volume to make it grow. And countless website owners have gotten frustrated or impatient with their ad revenue and gotten themselves in trouble by trying some dumb trick or another rather than engage a professional digital marketing agency.
Here’s a list to avoid being a statistic and having Google ban you:
Excessive keyword stuffing
Number-one with a bullet, people still try this nonsense today. Google already knew it would happen when they launched way back in 1997. These sites get found and blacklisted sometimes within minutes of posting! Trust us, Google knows when a search term is repeated just to pull in a search engine and focus an ad. That is why they are Google.
Altering the results of an ad click
This is an unexpected one, but lately some site owners have attempted to monkey with the ad click results in ways like framing the ad target site or redirecting it. Huge violation of TOS, and it’s happening more as AJAX methods get more sophisticated.
Colour masking
It is true that Google allows you to customize the colours of an ad unit to your taste, either making it stand out in contrast of blend in for aesthetics. Some site owners get cocky and set things like the ad unit’s text or link colours to the webpage background colour, or set it into a CSS div with the alpha set to transparency and then using absolute positioning to have different content behind it… There’s a million ways to pull little tricks to hide an ad, and they all spell “TOS violation” and get you banned.