It has been 2 years and 5 months since we had a complaint from Google. It is also interesting that they seem to be complaining about the same exact post that got them in a tizzy before on two separate occasions. However this time there is a new twist that tells us that some people are trying their hardest to show that they have personal issues and want to….. well read on and see for yourself.
Perhaps it is best to point out a few things. First off as you may have noted this is part 10 of an ongoing series and you can go back to part 1 here. Other statistics that prior to this post we have 1524 active posts. The other things we look to do is to target 500 words for each post as according to journalists that is the magic number that is not too long or too short. The post in question has 541 words so it is a bit longer than average. Our shortest post has about 300 words and under 490 words there are about 1% that are of that length. So for Google to repeatedly complain about this post that makes up 0.065% of our entire collection, does suggest some other motivation. That is why it is suggested you read the entire series. After all our shorter posts have a greater chance of being in violation.
The number of words is important to know as it is directly related to this complaint by Google that by the way is like trying to catch a greased pig. Apparently the post in question has or is displaying 2 Google ads at the same time. Now all things considered, as this post has images, it makes the post physically longer than a text only post that is the bulk of our posts. As are Google ads are placed by a plugin, we allow the plugin to comply with Google as it is programmed to do more or less providing you don’t use some insane parameters.
So for point of reference our parameters are set as such; 350 or more characters the plugin will randomly place the first Google ad. If there is more than 900 characters a second Google ad will be placed. If there is more than 1400 characters a third Google ad will be placed. So just to humor Google, we changed to 350,1000,2000 as well as shortened our cache timeout from 3 months to 2 days. That means cached pages will only now be kept 2 days before a new page is generated by viewing it.
Now all things considered, Google does not specify a base to compare to so the complaint becomes ambiguous. After all if you decide to reduce your font size, you can get the entire post on one page. Also the size and shape of screens changes widely so knowing what standard they are using becomes that greased pig as we have never seen two Google ads on the screen as they claim. In other words, it is up to the person viewing the post how big each page is, and we are 100% confident at any given time there are at least 50 viewer defined representations of how big a page is. So in other words it is impossible to comply leaving us in potential violation no matter what we do.
Google’s complaint:
Affected website: preapism.com
Example page where violation occurred: http://preapism.com/2011/02/01/no-old-ladyboys/
Action required: Please make changes immediately to your site to follow AdSense program policies.
Publishers may not implement Google ads in a manner that makes them more prominent than the content of the page itself. On mobile devices this includes placing two or more Google ads on the view screen at the same time. Please be aware that if you have responsive website design that ads may shift into non-compliant positions as the format of the screen changes.
So the best we can say is stay tuned for part 11 to see what happens.
