Google AdSense Account Best practices

Adsense is by far the most popular ad network for publishers around the globe. The reasons are pretty simple and straightforward. Google Adsense is the highest-paying ad network, most loved by major publishers for its quality and reputation.

Also, there is a lot of money to be made with AdSense. Some publishers make as much as a million-dollar per month while many individual publishers make hundreds of thousands every month.

It has become apparent to many ad publishers that having and maintaining your Adsense account is crucial for your residual income. You must equally understand that Adsense has a strict policy and quality guidelines which most publishers find difficult to maintain.

Sometimes it can be something as little as installing a plugin or linking to a potentially harmful site or even publishing content that you don’t own without giving credit to the rightful owner that could get you in trouble and get your Google Adsense account banned.

In this post, I decided to walk you through some of the Google AdSense account best practices that could increase your earnings and keep you out of trouble with AdSense.

So let’s start with what is AdSense.

What is Google Adsense?

Except you are a newbie in digital marketing or blogging. Adsense is one of the most popular names when it comes to serving ads.

AdSense is a Google-owned ad network for publishers which allows them to serve ads on their websites or blogs to earn money. The platform serves ads such as banner display ads, text ads, video and image, interstitials, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are sorted, administered, and maintained by Google.

How AdSense works

AdSense is one of the smartest tools created by Google and it works by matching paid ads to the publisher’s website based on their content and audience.

Publishers first of all have to create advertising space on their websites, and register by creating an account with Adsense. Ads will be filtered and displayed on publishers’ websites based on the highest bidder and then publishers will be paid based on their traffic, viewability, and clicks they deliver.

AdSense work as an automated system working behind doors to display the most suitable and the highest paid ads on your available space through a real-time auction and bidding.

At the same time, the system also bills all advertisers whose ads are showing on your website to collect all the payments and credit your account.

Google AdSense Account Creation

It is easy to create your Adsense account and start monetizing your traffic to earn money. The process takes just a few steps and minutes as shown in the diagram below. To create your AdSense account, start here

What next??

So, after completing your Adsense registration, you will notice some of the options in your newly created account will be grey. This means you still have some tasks to complete before your account will be fully activated. Learn more about how to activate your AdSense account here

Preventing Adsense Account Ban

Now that you have successfully created and activated your AdSense account. The least you could do is to violate AdSense policies.

Here are things you need to understand to avoid your account being banned.

Prevent invalid clicks

One of the worst things you could do is to ask your friends or family members to click on your Ads in order to earn you more money. In some cases, new publishers engage in shady deals or join ad-clicking groups in order to get more clicks and views.

This behavior is highly discouraged and can lead to your account being disabled. The AdSense team will surely detect this and quickly disable your account.

To prevent this from happening, DO NOT ask anyone to click on your ads including yourself and your visitors. For more info about this. read the Adsense program policy

Prevent using your code on unsupported language blogs

If your blog or website is not in the English language and certainly not among the Adsense support languages you will need to understand it will be a violation of the program policy.

If you try to configure your blog into a multilingual blog and use AdSense code on it. It will still be considered a violation of the program policies.

To avoid being banned, please do not paste your code on non-supported language blogs or websites.

Altering the Adsense code

One of the worst things you can do is to alter the AdSense code in ways they don’t recommend. Even if you are a programmer, you should not be tempted to modify the code against Adsense’s recommended modifications guidelines.

In recent AdSense Ad unit updates. They have done a great job by adding some of the features that made some people modify the code to suit their desired ad view. Modifications such as displaying ads with images and videos are now included.

Also, one responsive ad unit could do the trick by displaying all your desired ad sizes, colors, images, videos ads, and interstitials. Therefore, you do not need to alter the code which will even lead you to more trouble with AdSense.

Avoid Copyright content violation

AdSense is highly against copyright violations. This means, do not host copyrighted products on your website or blog as this could instantly get your Google AdSense account banned.

Some of this content includes movies and movie streaming, music, live shows, documents, and so on… It will be in your best interest to avoid hosting such content anytime on your blog or website in order to avoid an AdSense ban.

Including Ads in your emails

This sounds funny but actually, people do this in other to increase their ad views and clicks. They tend to blend the ads in their newsletter emails encouraging people to click on those Ads.

This is also a NO and unacceptable practice by the AdSense program. It is a form of malpractice that will also lead to your account being banned. DON’T DO IT.

Wrong advertising labels

Some publishers think is a smart way to use a call to action label such as “Click here to learn more”, “Click here to get a free gift”, “Click to see hot babe” “Click to meet single ladies” etc.

It is a wrong practice and NOT acceptable by the AdSense program. If you use pop-up scripts to display AdSense in pop-ups and readers have to click on it before being allowed to read the content? This is also a violation and not an acceptable practice.

Linking to illegal and copyright content

Another thing that will get you banned very quickly is to link your blog or website pages to sites that distribute illegal and copyrighted content. Google AdSense has zero tolerance when it comes to illegal behavior online.

As stated before, this will show that you recommend such behavior or you partner with such sites which is a big NO for the AdSense program. Below are some of those categories of websites considered to host illegal and copyrighted content.

1. Porn and adult content sites
2. Violent content
3. Racial content (Content that contains racist and hates speech)
4. Hacking/Cracking
5. Gambling/Casino
6. Pages selling Drugs, Alcohol (Beer or hard alcohol)
7. Websites that sell Weapons and ammunition
8. Distribution of coursework. Eg: Student Essays

Please DO NOT ever link your content to the above-listed sites in order to avoid being banned.

Avoid buying traffic

Google AdSense does not want you to buy traffic for the purpose of increasing viewability and clicks. This practice is considered a violation.

However, you are allowed to promote your content on social media platforms such as Facebook and other quality traffic platforms are considered NOT a violation even to the extent of boosting your blog posts. Read more for understanding the landing page experience.

Conclusions

There is so much money to be made with a Google AdSense account no doubt. The issue is, how to maintain your account for a long time without regularly getting into trouble which will lead to getting your account banned.

In recent years, Google AdSense has evolved so much with a lot of improvements making it easy for publishers to display ads and make money. At the same time, these updates also come with strict regulations which need to be avoided at all costs as we indicated above.

If you have ever had any issues with your AdSense account, please share them with us in the comment section so we can update this post and help others avoid the same problems.