Make Money from Blogs » Violation

Does having multiple items in a feed defy Adsense terms ?

ashish — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:13:40 +0000

If you have read about Adsense, you would also have read about how Google ensures the terms and conditions as well as the Program Policies enforced for Adsense. If you contradict those, you can be sure that either Google will ensure those policies themselves, or kick you out of the program. So, for example, Google has a policy about only showing 3 text units per blog, and the Adsense code itself ensures that will happen – so even though the code may be implemented in more than 3 locations, the ad will only show up in the first 3 places where the code is present.
Google can also kick out people when they are indulging in click fraud, which is also against their terms and conditions. So, if you ask people to click on your ads, or put ads next to images which may cause people to think that the ad explains the image, then Google is likely to give you a warning, or kick you out.
So, when Google rolled out the Adsense in feeds program, a lot of people have a similar query; each feed can have more than 1 items within the feed, and if the ad shows up more than 3 times, will this be against the policies. Google has responded that this will not be a problem (read more at the Google blog)

Many publishers have asked the question “Since feed items often get displayed with many feed items on a single web page, can using AdSense for feeds jeopardize the status of my AdSense account?” The answer is no. Having three ad units per page is a product specific policy for AdSense for content.
In essence, the variable ways in which feed items are displayed are controlled and optimized automatically by the AdSense for feeds application and the choices you make as a publisher in your AdSense account when configuring your AdSense for feeds ad units. This means we may automatically suppress ad impressions when we detect there are too many feed ad units being displayed, resize ads based on the size and length of your content, and adjust the ads that are displayed based on the device in which the feed is being read.

Stop Plagiarism: Add backlinks to your content feed

ashish — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:06:09 +0000

RSS feeds give a very easy to get your content up on other sites. Not a very good thing, given that a person looking to get some quick (and steal some content written after a lot of effort) content up on their site would just need to subscribe to your content, and then use this feed (through a plugin) to get this content up on their site. It is very easy to setup a plugin that will take this content from a RSS feed, and automatically get this content up on their site.
Now, there are many reasons as to why you want to not restrict your RSS feed to provide only a summary. If you do restrict your RSS feed to only have a short summary, then it will help in your battle against people who are copying your content, but think of the other implications on your regular readers. There are people who prefer to read content directly through their RSS readers, and you need to evaluate whether you want to cater to this group. However, many such readers are an important part of spreading the content of your blog, given that they spread such links to other people if they like the content. Further, you can place ads in these feeds and hope to make some money from these once you have enough people reading your feeds.
One way in which you can detect that such a problem exists is by adding a few backlinks in your RSS feed. People who manually copy the content can in some cases figure out that backlinks exist, and manually remove these links. Automated solutions have a very high probability of not determining these backlinks. The advantage of backlinks is that you will get a trackback onto your blog that will point to the copy blog. (Keep in mind that you will not derive any Page Rank benefit from these backlinks, as the other blog may not be in high standing with Google).

What to do when somebody accuses you of copyright violation ?

ashish — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 20:54:25 +0000

If you are indeed violating copyright and are not able to defend yourself on clear grounds, it may make sense to acknowledge that this may have indeed happened (either by mistake, or deliberately), and remove the offending material that is copyrighted. However, there are many cases when the notice for copyright violation has been mistakenly sent (or when the copyright violation was done by a tool, which screwed up somewhere). If this matter was reported to Google Adsense, Adsense will send you a notice of the complaint, since Google follows the terms of the DMCA (link to article). Google’s policy is:
It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For AdSense publishers, if we receive a notice or otherwise have reason to believe that your site is infringing, we may terminate your participation in the program.
However, if you believe that you have a strong case (link to article), then you can make a counter argument to the case. Follow the steps in the information at the link above, and you can actually fight against wrongful claims of copyright violation.

If somebody copies from your blog, then report to Google Adsense

ashish — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:50:39 +0000

One of the most critical ways to grow the readership of your blog is to get fresh content on a regular basis. Another important criteria is that your blog has content that is not copies onto many other sites, and is more exclusive (having exclusive content means that somebody searching for this content in a browser search will find your blog first; on the other hand, if other sites have the same content, then it is likely that atleast some of them will be listed before your site in search, reducing the potential of people visiting your blog).
And even on a matter of principle, why should you accept somebody else copying your content ? You do the hard work, and somebody copies your content and has a free time ? There are many tools available that enable you to determine whether somebody is copying your content, and you should use these tools on a regular basis. Once you find somebody copying your content (if the person just uses a few words or lines to refer to your blog, that is something you can consider since that means that the other blog is actually driving content to your blog; but if the other blog is totally copying your content, don’t accept that).
Send an email to the blog owner, leave a comment, write to their hosting company, do all these steps to escalate. Further, if the person has Adsense on their site, certainly report this copyright violation to Google Adsense (link to article):
From this page:

If you believe that another site is illegally copying the contents of your site, you may send a notice of alleged infringement by following the procedure below. Once we’ve received your report, rest assured that we will take appropriate action. To file a notice of infringement with us, you must provide a written communication (by fax or regular mail — not by email, except by prior agreement) that sets forth the items specified below. Please note that you will be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys’ fees) if you materially misrepresent that a product or activity is infringing your copyrights.

File the report at this actual Google AdSense DMCA complaint form (link)