Tips for maintaining an AdSense-friendly site with user-generated content

These days, user-generated content is everywhere, from the comments below newspaper articles, to the photos and videos shared on social networks. So it's no surprise that many publishers are monetizing this type of content with AdSense ads. But, while you're familiar with types of content which are compliant with the AdSense program policies, your users might not be. We understand that it's not always easy to monitor hundreds of new comments, posts, user profiles, videos, or photos every day, so here are a few ideas on how to maintain an advertiser-friendly environment on your pages.

As a quick note before we head into the tips, remember that inappropriate content can come in many forms -- images, forum posts, comments, links, and so on. For example, adult content isn't only limited to pornographic images; it can also be sexually explicit forum posts or spam bot comments with links to adult sites, which aren't permitted by our policies. We recommend reviewing our previous Inside AdSense post on this topic for further clarification and a few tests you can try on your content.

Now for the tips, which we've divided in two sections - 'Prevention' and 'Monitoring'.

Prevention

Here are some recommendations for ways to prevent your ads from appearing alongside user-generated content that isn't compliant with our policies:

1. Publish clear content guidelines and policies that your users will have to accept and adhere to in order to sign up and use your site's services.
   
2. If you own a photo or video sharing site where users are permitted to upload adult or other non-compliant content, clearly structure your content to avoid placing your ad code in sections/categories containing this type of content. The same idea could also be easily applied to online stores with adult sections or to classifieds sites which offer adult dating classifieds.
   
3. Ask users to tag their inappropriate content (e.g. sexually suggestive pictures or videos) as being non family-safe. This can help you perform human evaluations of potentially inappropriate content for AdSense ads. You can also try installing keyword filters for content related to adult topics, violence, or drugs, for instance. While we're unable to provide you with details about setting up these filters for your site, we recommend searching for terms such as "keyword filtering" or "content filtering" on Google.com.
   
4. Implement spambot protection for your comment forms, forums, and guest books. If you need more information on this topic, try a Google search for "spambot protection".

Monitoring

We suggest these tips to ensure that your existing user-generated content pages remain compliant with our policies:

1. Set up ways for your community to monitor itself. For example, try adding a "Report inappropriate content" link to your pages, to allow users to flag content for you to review.
   
2. Proactively review pages, videos, photos, etc. with high pageviews on a regular basis.
   
3. Spot-check content based on keywords, content search, or related user accounts. For example, try entering keywords related to inappropriate content in your own search engine and checking the results. Alternatively, you can search on Google.com using the following parameter, replacing 'example.com' with your own site's URL and 'keyword' with a specific word or phrase: "site:example.com keyword".
   
4. Create editorial policies and exercise moderator control in your comments, forums, and guestbook sections.

We hope you find these tips helpful. You can also read related information and suggestions from our Search Quality Team in a recent post on the Webmaster Central Blog. If you have any other ideas, or if you've already implemented similar measures on your sites with user-generated content, please feel free to leave a comment below and share your experience.

Posted by Gergana Marinova - AdSense Publisher Support

Engaging users with policy-compliant images and video

As it's becoming easier and easier to embed videos and pictures on websites, many publishers are now enhancing their current text content with relevant videos and photos. We wholeheartedly support adding these different forms of content to improve the user experience on your site -- hey, we like watching entertaining YouTube videos too! But here's a friendly reminder about keeping our program policies in mind when you choose video and image content for your site.

Before posting videos or pictures on a page with Google ads, put yourself in an advertiser's position and consider whether you would want to have your ad displayed on the page. If your content might potentially be seen as offensive or disturbing, an advertiser may not be comfortable running their ads on that page. Here are a few specific types of content that you can check for:

• Adult or mature: Includes, but is not limited to, images and videos containing sexual activity, full nudity, and lewd poses. Please review this recent post to determine whether your content might fall into this category.
• Violent or gory: Can include images and videos of street-fighting, people hurting each other, or gruesome accidents and their victims.
• Culturally insensitive or hate speech: Includes content promoting racial intolerance or advocating against a specific individual, group, or organization.

Also, keep in mind that publishers may not place AdSense ads on pages involved in the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. Unauthorized copyrighted materials include music, movies, images, or any other copyrighted material that the publisher does not own or license from the copyright owner.

The list above is by no means exhaustive, since there are always some borderline cases which will feature content that may be tame to one person but offensive to another. If you're uncertain about specific pictures or videos, we recommend that you err on the side of caution and refrain from placing this content on pages containing Google ads. In addition, if you host a site with user-generated content, we ask that you continually monitor your network to ensure that ads don't appear alongside the types of content described here.

Posted by Dan Zilic - AdSense Publisher Support