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Hey buddy,
Glad you could make it again. I’ve got something pretty significant that I wanted to share with you this week: I only found out about it myself last night.
First things first though.
Jakewatch
Jake is on holiday this week… doing what he does best: chilling like a Don. Check how ludicrous this is. He WhatsApp’d me this on Saturday.
It’s the apartment he’s been staying at in Vienna! This is why he’s in charge of organising company parties, nights out and holidays. What a legend!
AdSense Ad Limit Relaxation!
Anyways, back to business. Remember about a month ago in Blog 5 when I talked you through setting up your arb site and how you needed to pay special attention to the Google terms and conditions about how many AdSense ad units you have and not to––under any circumstances––go over that limit because otherwise Google would take your tiny site and your comparatively tiny livelihood and crush it to bits with their humungous AdSensey Ad-Limit-Per-Page hands?
Well, if you didn’t here’s a quick recap. You were only allowed to put 3 AdSense content ad units, 3 link units and 2 search boxes. And only one of the content ad units could be “large” (> 300×600) .
Here is what it *used* to say:
Well Google are kind of coy. They do stuff and change stuff and don’t really shout about it. But go back to the terms and conditions page that we gave you the link to and, what do you know?, they’ve changed the limits. They’ve removed them in fact!
Here is what it *now* says:
This is good news for us publishers!
Interestingly, the web link is still “https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en-GB#Ad_limit_per_page” but they’ve changed the subheading from “Ad limit per page” to “Valuable Inventory”, which makes it sound like something a pirate keeps in his treasure chest.
First of all let me break down the major positive changes for you…
1. You can now have more than 3 content ad units on a single page. Great!
2. You can now have more than one “large” content ad unit on a single page.
3. If you’re running mobile traffic, you can still only have one 320×100 content ad unit above the fold (but below the fold, there is now no limit now).
Fricking sweet.
…and highlight the restrictions that are now in place (but which are now a bit more ambiguous)
The new key phrases are:
1. “Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content.” (This appears to include all ‘paid promo material’ not just AdSense stuff.)
2. “… the content you provide should add value and be the focal point for users visiting your page.”
3. “For this reason, we may limit or disable ad serving on pages with little to no value and/or excessive advertising until changes are made.”
So, overall it seems like Google’s T&Cs have been relaxed a bit…
…but there’s now slightly ambiguous, subjective measures that your site could still fall foul of if you overload it with ad units and/or try to do kooky, ninja-s**t with your site.
What are we going to do about it?
Well, we have added back in one extra content ad unit to the bottom of our page (which historically was our worst performing one, by a long way, so we ended up moving it to the right-hand rail anyway), but we’re not going to go crazy and overload our pages.
I’ll give you an update next week to tell you if it’s been worth it.
And, if you try any tests, then let me know how you get on?
Nessie Arrows! Here today, gone tomorrow?
Final thing for this week.
We’ve spoken to so many people in the last few months about this and scoured the furthest corners of the internet. But we’ve never found any concrete answers about the conditions under which Nessie arrows disappear or how to get them back.
Finally, finally, finally! This week I managed to get through to a real-life Google person who told me some interesting, concrete things. As in, “your arrows need to be X pixels away from any clickable element on your page” kinda thing.
We’re currently Nessie-less, so we’re testing these things this week to see if they are legit. If they are, I look forward to sharing them with you next week (hopefully with a foolproof recipe of how to get the precious Nessies back for good)!
Have an amazing week!
Dan
