Policy Tips - Creating unique and valuable content

We enjoyed reading all your comments from our blog post on family-safe content. Today we’d like to shed some light on how to expand your business and attract more visitors by creating sites with unique and valuable content. This topic is one of our most asked about policies from publishers, and is often misunderstood because of the varying perspectives on what is considered unique and relevant content.

Creating a useful and information-rich site is essential to the AdSense business model to generate long-term revenue growth for publishers and to maintain a quality network. Not only does this enhance the user experience so your visitors stay longer to browse and possibly click on a relevant ad, but it also helps keep your account in good standing. Webmasters who clearly and accurately describe their content provide a much better user experience, and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit in the quality guidelines.

Copying content from other sites, auto-generating content, or rewriting content from other publications and monetizing these types of pages without permission or the necessary legal rights to do so is considered a violation of our program policies. If you see an article with content that you think would be interesting to share, or that you’re particularly passionate about, don’t copy it. Instead, write your own opinion regarding the issue. We love seeing the original and valuable content you come up with and we’ve found that our most successful partners are the ones that have developed a unique voice.

Some other things to keep in mind are to structure the layout of your site as intuitively as possible and to avoid confusing implementations that may unnaturally lead users to click on your ads or artificially inflate your impressions. Our policies around unique content also do not allow filling a page with keywords that are designed only to manipulate the targeting system and have no relation to the content or audience of the page. This practice results in badly matched ads, as well as a poor user experience. By adding unique content and services to your site, users will remember the added value and be more likely to visit again.

When creating a site, make the focal point about your users, not about search engine rankings or generating more clicks on ads. At Google, we grow our business with the notion “Focus on the users, and all else will follow,” and we hope you can also grow your business with us by following the same principle. Let’s make the AdSense network a clean and balanced environment, where you, the publishers, can grow together with users and advertisers.

Top 5 things you should know about invalid clicks

During the AdSense team’s recent policy webinars, a number of publishers posted questions on our Google Moderator page about invalid click activity and the resources available to help them protect their accounts. We’ve brought in experts from the Ad Traffic Quality team to address your top questions about invalid clicks here in this post today.

As a quick introduction, our responsibility on the Ad Traffic Quality team is to monitor traffic across Google’s ad network and prevent advertisers from paying for invalid traffic. We’ve recently launched an in-depth Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, a site designed for both advertisers and publishers to learn more about invalid clicks. This site also aggregates various resources that help you learn about invalid clicks and maintain a successful AdWords or AdSense account. Please note that the resource center is currently only in English, but will be available in all languages shortly.

Now, onto the top 5 topics that publishers most frequently ask about, and some guidance from our team:  

1. Monitoring your ad traffic 

There’s a lot that you can and should do to monitor your site’s traffic and prevent it from receiving invalid activity. You can find all of our suggestions and best practices listed in our Help Center. If at any time you’d like to report something suspicious, feel free to contact us using this form.

2. Returning earnings to our advertisers

Protecting our advertisers' interests by monitoring invalid click activity is one of the key ways we strive to keep the network a balanced ecosystem where users, publishers, and advertisers can all grow and thrive together. To protect the integrity of our advertising environment, we return earnings from disabled AdSense accounts to affected advertisers, as stated in our Disabled Account FAQ.

3. Our mechanisms catch on to trends

Google uses real-time detection and filtering systems to examine each click on an AdWords ad. We look at numerous data points for each click, including the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. Our system then analyzes these factors to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks before they ever reach your account reports. Our engineers are constantly improving our monitoring technology, enhancing filters, and examining a growing set of signals.

In addition to our automated click protection techniques, we have a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When our system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important information about the source of the potentially invalid clicks.

4. How we determine sabotage

Sabotage, which some publishers refer to as ‘click bombing’, is an act committed by a third party to generate invalid activity on a publisher’s ads without their knowledge or permission. Although this topic often comes up on our forums and in the questions we’ve received, we’ve found that click bombing represents only a small fraction of invalid activity. As mentioned in point #3, we’re constantly improving our detection systems to identify these patterns of sabotage and filter them as invalid. We’re committed to protecting our publishers as well as our advertisers, as our goal is to grow the network while continuing to ensure that it is safe and enjoyable for all.

5. You can contact us if you feel your account was wrongfully disabled

We want to work with you and provide you as many resources as we can to resolve issues you may have. If your account has been disabled and you feel that the decision was made in error, we have a process for appealing the decision in your account. For more information, see our Help Center.

Policy webinars recap

Based on your feedback from our previous blog posts, we’ve heard you’d like to learn more about our policies. Over the past few months, the AdSense Policy team has hosted webinars with publishers from across North America, Russia, Turkey, Poland, Italy, and France. In keeping with our monthly policy tips, we’d like to take this time to recap on our recent publisher events and to summarize our findings for you.

Policies are in place for the success of publishers and advertisers. One of the common pieces of feedback we hear from AdSense publishers who are just starting out is that there’s a lot of information to read about the program. We understand that it can be challenging navigating our policies, and frustrating not being able to talk to a policy specialist directly. As a result, our policy team was available to answer your top questions during these recent webinars. In addition, the Policy team delivered a condensed overview of common policy violations to avoid and general best practices and tips to help maintain your account in good standing.

We went through a run-through of live demos and examples, which attendees told us were helpful. Many found that overall the sessions were helpful and that they gained a good understanding of our policies. Many publishers were unaware of the resources available to help you with policy notifications in our Help Center. We’ve posted your top policy questions and our answers on our Google Moderator page, which we encourage you to take a look at. If you’d like to listen to a recording of our presentation, please watch our YouTube video.

We’d like to thank all of you for your great feedback and questions. If you found the policy webinars valuable or have suggestions on which topics you’d like to hear about next, let us know by leaving a comment below. If you’re interested in attending future events like these, make sure that you’re opted in to ‘Special Offers’ in your email preferences within your AdSense account. We look forward to hosting more policy webinars in the future, and look for more policy updates from us by subscribing to the AdSense blog.