Don’t Click Your Own Ads

I know it sounds crazy, but some people do hide their ads. What they do is hide the text of the ad, leaving only the URL visible in an attempt to make visitors think that the URL is part of a list of links or a blog roll — the list of links to other blogs that you (as a blog owner) recommend. Do I need to tell you that Google frowns on this practice? You might think hiding the nature of your links sounds like a great idea, especially in the context of blending your ads into your Web pages as much as possible, but it’s not. Don’t be fooled if someone tells you she’s done this and it worked well for her. If you try it and Google catches any indications that you’re doing something deceptive like this, you’ll be banned from the AdSense program. What’s more, you could also be excluded from search results generated by the Google search engine. If you intend to show AdSense ads on your Web site, let them be seen. You can blend them with the other text on the page or even make the backgrounds the same color as your page background. Don’t hide the text leaving only the link visible. It might garner you a few clicks in the beginning, but the end results could be disastrous. Don’t Click Your Own Ads Of all the no-nos you hear about AdSense, this is the most important one. Don’t click your own ads. Clicking your own ads might seem like just the thing to do. After all, you don’t want ads on your site that you don’t know where they lead, and it wouldn’t hurt to bump your income just a touch. Hold it just a minute! That’s completely the wrong way to think about it. If everyone could just click their own ads and run up their profits, life would indeed be grand, but clicking your own ads is a form of click fraud. Click fraud is when you fraudulently drive up the number of ad clicks from people (yourself included) who aren’t actually interested in whatever the ad promises. See, AdSense only works if AdWords works, and AdWords only works if people are truly interested in the ads that AdWords users create. AdWords users place their ads for people to see, and Web site owners who use AdSense then publish the ads for their Web site visitors to view and (hopefully) click. If no one clicks the ads, AdWords users aren’t charged a fee for placing the ad and AdSense users aren’t paid for placing the ads. If someone does click through the ads but never makes a purchase or completes a transaction with the advertiser, advertisers will quit using AdWords and people like you who want to make money from showing ads will have no ads to display. Make sense? When you click your own ads, you’re not usually interested in the content of the ad. That said, I admit that I’ve clicked one of my own ads because I truly was interested in what it was advertising. Of course, I realized my mistake almost instantly, and I never clicked one again. If I see an ad I’m interested in, I go directly to the URL that’s provided. I understand that you probably want to know where your ads lead. I don’t blame you, and neither does Google. That’s why there are tools, such as the AdSense preview tool — the AdSense extension for Firefox that lets you preview how ads appear on your page and where those ads lead to. The AdSense preview tool is a free tool, and when you use it as directed, you can click the ads on your own pages without fear of repercussions. What repercussions you might ask? Getting banned from AdSense, of course!