Adsense Ads and Content Criticism Abuse

Adsense ads and content Criticism Abuse, Some webmasters create sites tailored to lure searchers from Google and other engines onto their AdSense site to make money from clicks. These "zombie" sites often contain nothing but a large amount of interconnected, automated content (e.g.: A directory with content from the Open Directory Project, or scraper sites relying on RSS feeds for content). Possibly the most popular form of such "AdSense farms" are splogs ("spam blogs"), which are centered around known high-paying keywords. Many of these sites use content from other web sites, such as Wikipedia, to attract visitors. These and related approaches are considered to be search engine spam and can be reported to Google. There have also been reports of Trojans engineered to produce fake Google ads that are formatted to look like legitimate ones. The Trojan Horse apparently downloads itself onto an unsuspecting computer through a web page and then replaces the original ads with its own set of malicious ads.Adsense ads and content Criticism Due to concerns about click fraud, Google AdSense has been criticized by some Search engine optimization firms as a large source of what Google calls "invalid clicks" in which one company clicks on a rival's search engine ads to drive up its costs. Some publishers have been blocked by Google, complaining that little justification or transparence was provided. To help prevent click fraud, publishers can choose from a number of click tracking programs. These programs will display detailed information about the visitors who click on the AdSense advertisements. Publishers can use that data to determine if they've been a victim of click fraud or not. There are a number of such commercial scripts available for purchase. An open source alternative is AdLogger.

Because AdSense adverts use non-xhtml compliant methods to display the advert blocks they will break xhtml strict pages. This is due to the use of the document.write method, which is deprecated in favour of DOM manipulation in xhtml, and the use of the iframe element, which is deprecated because it ties markup to presentation. This can be worked around by keeping the AdSense code in a separate html4 file served as text/html and including this in the application/xml+xhtml file using the object element.

Google adsense ads and content has also come under fire for allowing AdWords advertisers to abuse trademarks. In 2004, Google started allowing advertisers to bid on any search terms, including the trademarks of their competitors. The payment terms for AdSense customers have also been criticized. Google withholds payment until an account reaches US$100, but many small content providers require a long time - years in many cases - to build up this much AdSense revenue. These pending payments are recorded on Google's balance sheet as "accrued revenue share". At the close of its 2006 fiscal year, the sum of all these small debts amounted to a little over US$370million - cash that Google is able to invest but which effectively belongs to its customer