Sushant Risodkar

15 Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS

by Sushant Risodkar · 2 comments

Google AdSense

Google Adsense program is a popular web advertising program which provides a good income source for many websites. There are well defined terms of service to strictly adhere to when participating in the program.

On my visit through sites and forums, I daily notice several instances of misuse of Adsense ads. So here a few helpful Google Adsense tips, probably many you already know, and few you might gain by knowing now. These adsense faq are all picked from the Program Policies, Terms and Conditions and FAQ itself and presented in a simplified manner.

1. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

2. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site which offer Google Adsense competition in their field. Never try to create link structures resembling the adsense ads. Never use other competitive search tools on the same pages which have Adsense powered Google search. They do allow affiliate or limited-text links. Update: Google has allowed you to run contextual advertising like Yahoo ads, Chitika etc provided the ads do not resemble Adsense ads.

5. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

6. Label headings as “sponsored links� or “advertisements� only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

9. Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads. Content drives relevant ads. Although you might manage some clicks from error, login, registration, “thank you� or welcome pages, parking pages or pop ups, it will get you out of the program.

10. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

11. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

12. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

13. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches – Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

14. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing – Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

15. Ensure you Language is Supported – Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkishâ€�. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

Update:
16. Maximum 2 referral button per product per page – With the launch of the google adsense referral program, you are allowed to put only 2 referral buttons for adsense referral, adwords referral, Google pack and Firefox with google toolbar referral.

17. Do not specify Google ads as your alternate ads. – Several services like Chitika eminimalls allow you to place alternate urls, when a targeted paying ad cannot be displayed. This involved creating an simple html page and putting the ad to be displayed instead. Even Adsense allows an alternate url feature instead of displaying public service ads. But never use Adsense ads as alternate urls.

18. Do not confuse with adjacent images – It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. More.

Whenever in doubt, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. They are very helpful!

Blogger Template:Integral

by Sushant Risodkar

This blogger template is compatible with blogger beta. That means you don’t have to switch your blogger to classic template to use it. It’s a two column template with labels as the menu. I’ve tried my best to make it as usable as possible. In case of any bugs let me know.

How to install this template

  • Login to your blogger account.
  • Go to template.
  • Go to edit html.
  • Upload the template and enjoy. :)

Recommendation: It is recommended you backup your template and the widgets code first.


How to Highlight Author Comments

by Sushant Risodkar

Highlighting author comments using a different background color, border or different style of text helps readers understand when you have personally posted a response.

So far, “How to Highlight Author Comments” has been the most requested article in my Skribit widget, so in this post I’ll explain how you can change comments which you have posted yourself to distinguish these from other comments on your posts.

The main obstacle I’ve faced in writing up this article so far is that different Blogger templates code the comments section differently.

While the easiest method for me to write would have been to say “Find this code and replace it with this”, such a method would only be usable by bloggers whose template matches the code.

Instead, my explanation may be a little more complicated than usual, though I hope this explanation will ensure anyone using a Blogger template will understand how to implement the highlighted author comments hack!

Backup your Blogger Template!

Before even attempting to customize your Blogger template, the first thing you should do is back up your template. This ensures you can easily restore your original template if something goes wrong. Also, as most of us cannot see comments unless we are viewing a post page, it would be impossible to see if code changes have adversely affected the comments section.

To make a backup of your Blogger template, simply go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard, and click on the “Download Full Template” link. This will save your existing template as an XML file which you could use to restore your blog, just in case 🙂

Finding the Comments Block in your Blogger Template

The first thing we need to do in order to implement this hack is to locate the “comments block” within your Blogger template.

To find the comments section, you will need to tick the “expand widget templates” box as this code is contained within your main “Blog Posts” widget.

As I’ve already pointed out, the section of code used to display comments varies in different templates, so in order to find this section, you may need to search for some specific tags rather than complete sections of code.

To give you an idea of what you are searching for, here is the complete comments-block code from the Minima template:

<dl id=’comments-block’>
<b:loop values=’data:post.comments’ var=’comment’>
<dt class=’comment-author’ expr:id=’data:comment.anchorName’>
<a expr:name=’data:comment.anchorName’/>
<b:if cond=’data:comment.authorUrl’>
<a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’ rel=’nofollow’><data:comment.author/></a>
<b:else/>
<data:comment.author/>
</b:if>
<data:commentPostedByMsg/>
</dt>
<dd class=’comment-body’>
<b:if cond=’data:comment.isDeleted’>
<span class=’deleted-comment’><data:comment.body/></span>
<b:else/>
<p><data:comment.body/></p>
</b:if>
</dd>
<dd class=’comment-footer’>
<span class=’comment-timestamp’>
<a expr:href=’data:comment.url’ title=’comment permalink’>
<data:comment.timestamp/>
</a>
<b:include data=’comment’ name=’commentDeleteIcon’/>
</span>
</dd>
</b:loop>
</dl>

If you are using Minima (or a similar template) you should be able to locate this section of code easily. However, some templates use <ul> and <li> instead of <dl> and <dd> tags, in which case the code you are looking for may look more like the section on this page instead, or could even be wrapped in simple

tags.

If you are having trouble locating the comments section in your blog’s HTML code, do a CTRL+F (or CMD+F for Mac users) search within your template code for the following template tags:

* <b:loop values=’data:post.comments’ var=’comment’>
* <data:comment.author/>
* <data:comment.body/>

The comments section of your blog’s HTML code should contain all three of these template tags. Simply locate these tags and the surrounding code in your template, then work out where this section begins and ends using your discretion.

Generally speaking, this section will usually begin with

or

    or

    and end with a matching closing tag.

    Changing the comments code to add author highlighting

    Once you have located your comments section in your blog’s HTML code, you will need to highlight this entire section of code and replace it with the following section of code instead:

    <ul class=’commentlist’ style=’margin: 0; padding: 0;’>
    <b:loop values=’data:post.comments’ var=’comment’>
    <b:if cond=’data:comment.author == data:post.author’>

    <li class=’author-comments’ style=’margin: 0 0 10px 0;’>
    <b:if cond=’data:post.dateHeader’>
    <div class=’commentcount’/>
    </b:if>
    <cite>
    <b:if cond=’data:comment.authorUrl’>
    <a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’><data:comment.author/></a>
    <b:else/>
    <data:comment.author/>
    </b:if>
    </cite>
    <br/>
    <div style=’clear: both;’/>
    <b:include data=’comment’ name=’commentDeleteIcon’/>
    <p><data:comment.body/></p>
    <div class=’commentlink-date’><a class=’commentlink’ expr:href='”#comment-” + data:comment.id’ title=’comment permalink’>
    <data:comment.timestamp/>
    </a></div>

    <div class=’clear’/>

    </li>

    <b:else/>

    <li class=’general-comments’ style=’margin: 0 0 10px 0;’>
    <b:if cond=’data:post.dateHeader’>
    <div class=’commentcount’/>
    </b:if>
    <cite>
    <b:if cond=’data:comment.authorUrl’>
    <a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’><data:comment.author/></a>
    <b:else/>
    <data:comment.author/>
    </b:if>
    </cite>
    <br/>
    <div style=’clear: both;’/>
    <b:include data=’comment’ name=’commentDeleteIcon’/>
    <p><data:comment.body/></p>
    <div class=’commentlink-date’><a class=’commentlink’ expr:href='”#comment-” + data:comment.id’ title=’comment permalink’>

    <data:comment.timestamp/>
    </a></div>
    <div class=’clear’/>
    </li>

    </b:if>
    </b:loop>
    </ul>

    The simplest way to change your comment code is to follow these steps:

    1. Copy the code above to your clipboard
    2. Highlight the entire section of your comment code in your Blogger template
    3. Paste the code from your clipboard in place of the existing code by keying CTRL+V (or CMD+V).

    One quick method to check if you have made code errors is to preview your template. If you have accidentally omitted some code, you will receive an error message. In this case, you should press the “clear edits” button and begin again.

    If you don’t get an error message, you can then proceed to save your template.

    Adding style for author comments

    At this stage, your own comments will still appear in the same style as other comments. To highlight author comments, we need to add some style code to your blog template.

    This step is much easier than locating and changing the comment section. Simply locate the closing tag in your Blogger template, and immedietly before this, paste the following section of code:

    .author-comments {
    background: #cccccc;
    border: 1px solid #333333;
    padding: 5px;
    }

    If you prefer, you can change the hex colors (#cccccc and #333333) to match the color scheme of your own template (discover the color codes for your preferred schemes using the web color calculator).

    Then save your template.

    Now when you make a comment on your blog while signed in to your Blogger account, your comments will have a different border and background color to comments posted by your readers.


My Blog Loading Time Is Good…

by Sushant Risodkar · 3 comments

Many People in last few days told me that your blog is opening very slow.I was in tension due to this from many hours today..but i resolved it>And Now You Can See the Result>>>

See The Image.I have conducted my blog speed test with diffrent speed types

So Now If anybody still having problem just reply with your Net Speed,Place,Provider.I will try my best to reduce the problem,

Thank You!

How To Add Star Ratings to your Blogger Blog

by Sushant Risodkar · 3 comments

Star ratings is a new feature currently available through Blogger in Draft. This enables you to add a widget beneath your posts which readers can use to rate your articles on a scale of 1-5, like this:

If you use a default Blogger template, you should be able to activate this feature right away when logged through Blogger in Draft: simply go to Layout>Page Elements and edit the “Blog Posts” widget to activate the display.

However, those using a customized or third party template will need to add the required code to their templates first. In this tutorial, I’ll explain how you can add “star-rating” functionality to your customized Blogger template.

To use the “star ratings” feature, you will first need to activate this through Blogger in Draft (it’s still in beta, and not yet available for use in the regular Blogger dashboard).

Log into Blogger in Draft and choose the blog you wish to work with. Then go to Layout>Page Elements, and click the “Edit” link on the “Blog posts” widget.

This screen offers many options for you to add (or remove) from the posts section of your blog. If you scroll down a little, you’ll see the “star ratings” option. Tick this option to activate this setting for your blog, then scroll down to save your settings.

If you are using a default template, you should see the star ratings widget appear on the post pages of your blog. However, if you have customized your template (or are using a third party template), it is likely that your template does not include the code required to make the star ratings display.

Here is how you can add the required code for star ratings to your non-standard Blogger template

Step 1: Backup your existing template. I assume you know it very well so I am not gonna explain it again.

Step 2: Expand widget templates and copy the entire code some where in Notepad or something. In case something goes wrong, you have the entire widget code.

*Step 3: Go to ‘Layouts’ and under ‘Blog post’ widget, select Star rating. And save the changes.

*Step 4: Go to ‘Edit HTML’ and select ‘Expand widget templates’.

Step 5: Search for this line of code:

<p><data:post.body/></p>

Step 6: Copy the following code right after the above line of code:

Click here For The Code!

Step 7: Now again search for following code:

<b:include name=’feedLinks’/>

This line you may find several times, so make sure you seek for the last instance at the bottom of the code which should ideally be before the start of sidebar codes. So when you see this line, it should look something like:

<b:include name=’feedLinks’/>

  </div>

            </div>

        <div class=’cont-bottom’/>

        </div>

        </div>

        </div>

 </b:includable>

</b:widget>

</b:section>

….

….

<div id=’sidebars’>

Step 8: Copy the following code right after the line mentioned above:

<b:if cond=’data:top.showStars’>

    <script src=’http://www.google.com/jsapi’ type=’text/javascript’/>

    <script type=’text/javascript’>

      google.load(&quot;annotations&quot;, &quot;1&quot;);

      function initialize() {

        google.annotations.setApplicationId(<data:top.blogspotReviews/>);

        google.annotations.createAll();

        google.annotations.fetch();

      }

      google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize);

    </script>

  </b:if>

Step 9:Preview your changes without saving it. You should see the star rating in each post on your blog posts on the main page itself.

Step 10: That’s it, save your template if satisfied and enjoy the Star ratings on your blog.

Also let me know if this post helped you in customising your template by dropping a comment here or at least leaving your rating.

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