Google's AdSense is one of the fastest and easiest way to make money from your website. However, it has a strict policy that isn't something to fiddle with.
If a website provides pornography, sales of drugs and weapons, gambling and hate speech among others, it's considered violating Google's policies. As a result, the website can be blocked from the AdSense network. But Google is known to block an entire website if it sees a violation, even on a single page. Google blocked entire websites, rather than individual web pages.
Considering that only 12 percent of publishers that apply AdSense are approved, being banned from ever using AdSense again could be a nightmare to some.
On May 15th, 2017, Google is changing that.
The company is rolling out technological capabilities that will allow it to disapprove AdSense ad serving at the page level rather than having to disable its ads across an entire site. What this means, if a website's page is violating its policy, only that page will lose ads. Publishers can still show ads on other pages that aren't violating.
This can certainly appeal many publishers, and also Google itself as it can make money out of it. This is because Google can now eliminate ads from individual pages, effectively cutting down the number of websites out of its ad network.
While this approach is more lenient on publishers, it doesn't mean that Google is not having its eyes on the website. Google can still suspend an entire website from using AdSense, or having its publishers' accounts suspended or disabled, whenever it sees fit.
The change is made after several major brands and organizations pulled their advertising from YouTube and other Google products entirely over fears that criminals and extremists were profiting from their ads. Advertisers that were concerned they are funding illegal and offensive websites, are pledging stricter controls on where online adverts appear.
This is a key change that affects more than 2 million AdSense publishers.
According to Rick Summers, Google's global lead for publisher policies
According to Scott Spencer, a director of product management in advertising for Google:
"This is not reactive to what’s going on in the industry. This is an improvement for publishers ... in terms of how we can take action for our policies."
Google is also expanding its hate-speech rules for AdSense. The policy on “Content that advocates against an individual, group, or organization” states that “dangerous or derogatory content” cannot be monetized via AdSense. Another big change is a broadening beyond the relatively high bar of establishing that content promotes violence.
With the update, any content that promotes discrimination or disparages an individual or group based on any characteristic “associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization” is considered a violation.
The hate-speech rules for AdSense also applies at the page level.
Google is also creating a new platform for publishers to better manage any suspensions of ads on their websites. The "Policy Center" is meant to tell publishers how many violations a page has, and for what type of content. Google will provide guidance on how to fix the problem so ads may continue on the said page.