AdSense Policy Updated: January 17, 2007

The Google AdSense Policy was updated this evening. The one thing that wasn’t surprising was the new reference to images near ads:

• May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks
• May not place misleading images alongside individual ads

This isn’t new information, the AdSense team made this clear in a blog entry a few weeks ago. But there is a major change that will take a lot of publishers by surprise. The implications of their Competitive Ads policy are far reaching:

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.

This means if you were running ANY ads that resembled AdSense ANYWHERE on your site, they have to be removed, or changed significantly as to not look like any of the colors or AdSense layouts. Apparently you can still run YPN on the same site, but you can’t use the same color palette. I would actually interpret that statement to say you CAN’T run YPN because the layouts are similar, but Jensense says you can run YPN as long as the colors aren’t the same.

One thing I noticed was the reference to other contextual ads being removed. I don’t have the old policy saved so I can’t confirm this at the moment, but it would appear that as long as you aren’t running ads that look like AdSense, you can still run contextual ads. This should open the door for IntelliTXT and Kontera as well as Amazon.

I’ve emailed my AdSense rep to get clarification. This may be the end of Google telling publishers “NO” to IntelliTXT.