{"id":1853,"date":"2017-05-31T15:37:12","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T14:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oko.uk\/?p=1853"},"modified":"2017-05-31T15:37:12","modified_gmt":"2017-05-31T14:37:12","slug":"google-deems-excessive-advertising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cool.co\/supply-side-platform-home\/google-deems-excessive-advertising\/","title":{"rendered":"What does Google deem as “Excessive Advertising”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Google changed the number of ad units allowed per page back in August 2016, they removed the previous “3 display unit” hard limit. Some publishers chose to interpret this as “unlimited ads”, but as we warned at the time<\/a> this is as much about requiring a higher proportion of valuable content as it is about limiting the number of ad units.<\/p>\n

It seems that Google engineering have been busy and cracked a way of enforcing this rule change at scale. We\u2019re seeing evidence of more warnings and enforcement relating to “little to no value” and\/or “excessive advertising”<\/a>, so thought that it was an appropriate time for a recap of what is expected and to share some of what we have learned about how these rules are being enforced.<\/p>\n

Recap: How many ads does Google allow? (AdSense or Ad Exchange)<\/h2>\n

The rules used to be simple: 3 AdSense for Content units, 5 Ad Exchange for Content units per pages (plus additional link units and search boxes). Hard limits have now been replaced by the direction that “Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content”. The theory is simple: Give less space to ads than you do to content and you will be fine.<\/p>\n

In practice this can be more complex than it first seems, so let’s look at how to check how you are doing and some of the more common mistakes we see publishers getting picked up on:<\/p>\n

How we measure this at OKO<\/h2>\n

A simple way to spot check pages is to use a screenshot extension that lets you draw over the capture. We highlight all ads and paid promotional content (from any network) in red, and all content in green. Everything else (navigation, related articles,third party widgets etc) remains uncoloured. Shrinking the resulting image down gives a good indication of the balance between ads and content.<\/p>\n

We’ve done that on the example below taken from a local newspaper website. The red blocks are adverts. The green are the actual page content. You can see that there is a lot of “filler” – large blocks of related content (essentially navigation) to make the balance of ads to content look more acceptable.<\/p>\n

To recap, only the green blocks are real content. This is far outweighed by the red advertising areas. This page would be in breach of Google’s ad placement policies if it ran Google ads anywhere on that page.<\/p>\n

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Common publisher mistakes<\/h2>\n

Short article pages<\/h3>\n

When we talk to publishers about ads exceeding content we are often shown examples of the richest content available on the publisher’s site. However, websites tend to have pages with greatly varying content. If you\u00a0designing layouts with only your richest pages in mind then you could find your shorter content pages being flagged. We advise publishers to check their short content pages and also to be periodically double-checking all of their highest traffic pages as these are more likely to cause problems.<\/p>\n

\"Short<\/p>\n

If you do find that your content varies in length enough to cause problems, there are a number of ways to tackle this:<\/p>\n