In a move to increase transparency on penalising websites and blogs for policy violations, Google has announced two changes to its AdSense network. The search giant said in a blog post that it was done following requests from publishers to be more transparent in its response to policy violations on their content.
Publishers want to know why Google removes ads from their websites, and want the company to come up with a mechanism to help them resolve issues faster and minimize the impact. So, Google has announced two updates based on direct feedback from publishers.
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The first change that Google has made to its AdSense technology is removal of ads from particular pages that violate its policy and not from the whole website as was practised in the past. Google is also set to introduce a "Policy Center" to help website publishers understand the programmes' rules and fix violations more quickly.
"Historically, for most policy violations, we remove all ads from a publisher's site. As we roll out page-level policy action as the new default for content violations, we'll be able to stop showing ads on select pages, while leaving ads up on the rest of a site's good content. We'll still use site-level actions but only as needed," wrote Scott Spencer, director of sustainable ads for Google.
He, however, said that publishers will be terminated in case of persistent violation of its policy.
Publishers can check policy actions that affect their sites and pages from the "Policy Center" which will be announced soon. Spencer said that "We have been piloting this Policy Center with thousands of AdSense publishers, who have been very positive about these changes—and provided great feedback and suggestions on how to make the Policy Center more useful."
So, will the new changes to AdSense affect bloggers and YouTubers?
The changes were made in the interest of publishers, to enable them to fix any issue more quickly by using step-by-step instructions. Taking down ads only on the pages that violate company policy means publishers will not be in danger of ads wash out in their websites or blogs. The move will also help Google earn more, as its revenue from AdSense is huge.
It is not known if Google will make changes to ads on YouTube. Google recently changed the way ads are displayed on YouTube after companies started boycotting it over appearance of their ads in offensive videos. The change was not without its limitations as there were cases of good videos been penalised unfairly.
