AdSense adds new ‘Policy Center’ for publishers, will soon enforce ad policies at the page level by default

Google has announced today a couple of initiatives to make AdSense more transparent for publishers. Not only is Google announcing a new ‘Policy Center’ today that will serve as a “one-stop shop” for publishers to control policy actions on their site, but the company says that soon policy actions will happen on the page level by default, leaving ads on non-offending parts of a site alone…

The first big feature is the Policy Center, which Google says will serve as a “one-stop shop for everything a publisher needs to know about policy actions that affect their sites and pages.” And it seems that is definitely the case, as it will provide “page-level action data,” reasons behind the policy actions that were taken against violating parts of publishers sites, and steps to resolve these issues quickly.

In just a few weeks, all AdSense publishers will have more transparency about why policy actions were taken and the violations found, including page-level action data, so they can quickly resolve these issues across all their sites and pages using step-by-step instructions. The Policy Center also makes it easy for publishers to tell us when policy issues have been resolved and their pages are ready for review.

Google says it has been piloting this feature with “thousands of AdSense publishers” and that is launching more widely “within a few weeks.”

The second big change that Google announced today is its move from site-level to page-level policy actions. Until now, the default action taken when an offense against AdSense policies was found was to completely disable ads site-wide. This was obviously not very popular with publishers (we’ve been there ourselves), and so now Google is making it so that ads are disabled on a page-by-page basis.

As we roll out page-level policy action as the new default for content violations, we’ll be able to stop showing ads on select pages, while leaving ads up on the rest of a site’s good content. We’ll still use site-level actions but only as needed. And when it’s necessary, such as in the case of egregious or persistent violations, we’ll still terminate publishers. Altogether, this means fewer disruptions for publishers.

This is obviously very good news for publishers, as it means ads that sit near content that doesn’t offend will still be able to generate revenue as publishers work to fix the offending content. Google does say, however, that it will still take site-level actions in some cases and even completely terminate some publishers when there is evidence of “egregious or persistent violations.”

More AdSense coverage:

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