Google Sneak’s images next to its ads
I was over at blog.outer-court today and I could not believe my eyes when I read this. My jaw literally dropped! Something that adsense site owner’s like to do is put pictures next to adsense which helps the click through rate as people tend to identify pictures with links next to them which is a sneaky way to improve CTR that is prohibited in googles TOS. Here is an example of an adsense site owner placing ads next to images to improve ctr.
So google seems to have done something amost exactly against its OWN TOS. I guess its ok if google does it but NOT us.
This is what they have to say about their own images next to advertisers.
Actually, I don’t see any images near the advertisement when I search for “christmas” (I used google.com, gl=us). Anyway, there is a difference between what many webmasters used to do and what Google have done.
First, Google doesn’t show more than 1 image (1 repetitive image is still 1 image) and they don’t seem to be “click-willing” unlike the screenshot which you published above.
This is my personal feeling…