Google announced today that it has updated its AdWords policies on software principles, arbitrage, advertiser claims and relevance, clarity and accuracy. The changes will go into effect on October 15.
Google has added specific examples of the kinds of advertiser behavior "typically associated with arbitrage". These include:
- Websites designed for the sole or primary purpose of showing ads
- Websites with interstitial ads (unexpected pages that appear when navigating from one page to the next)
- Websites with scraped content from other sites
- Websites with gibberish content that makes no sense or seems auto-generated
- Templated or pre-generated websites that provide duplicate content to users
- Websites with deceptive navigation, where users can't find an advertised product or service
- Websites with indistinguishable ads, where you can't tell ads from the rest of that site's content
- Websites that are malicious or frustrating, where any click on the site results in clicking an ad
- Ads that are targeted with keywords unrelated to the topic and/or business model of the website
- Ad text that is unrelated to the topic or business model of the website
"We've made it even clearer how advertisers must be fully transparent in their ads when describing the experiences on their landing pages," says Google's Global Advertising Policy Lead, Mansi Goel. "We've beefed up our rules about the use of keyword insertion in ads."
"We've reworked our AdWords policy governing Software Principles to ensure that users are given important information before downloading software on their computers and that the software is not harmful or hard-to-uninstall," Goel adds.
This page shows a big list of specific changes.