Today Google Is Announcing Two Updates, Must Read

More ads transparency for publishers

Publishers are the backbone of the open web—the content creators, journalists, amateur videographers and our go-to guides for information. Fifteen years ago, Google decided to help publishers make money from their content by starting AdSense, Google first publisher platform. And today,Google ad platforms are used by millions of publishers, large and small, as a way to grow their businesses. In 2016, we paid out more than $11 billion to our publisher partners from advertising.

Policies play an important role in protecting the open web. They ensure publishers have a sustainable way to make money through Google ads platforms, setting rules about what we do and don’t allow. For example, publishers can’t just have a site full of ads. Google policies exist to balance publishers’ needs with those of Google users, advertisers and all of the parties that depend on it to keep the open web going.

One of the top requests Google hears from publishers is that they want more transparency about how Google respond to policy violations on their content. They want more information about why Google remove ads on their websites and more help to resolve issues quickly, minimizing the impact on their bottom line.

Today Google is announcing two updates, based on direct feedback from publishers, to how our policies are enforced and communicated to publishers.

Policy actions at the page level

Google is  introducing a new technology for policy violations that allows Google to act more quickly and more precisely when Google need to remove ads from content that violates Google  policies. Historically, for most policy violations, Google  remove all ads from a publisher’s site. As Google roll out page-level policy action as the new default for content violations, Google will be able to stop showing ads on select pages, while leaving ads up on the rest of a site’s good content. Google will  still use site-level actions but only as needed. And when it's necessary, such as in the case of egregious or persistent violations, Google will still terminate publishers. Altogether, this means fewer disruptions for publishers.

A new Policy Center for publishers that use AdSense

Google is also announcing a new Policy Center as a one-stop shop for everything a publisher needs to know about policy actions that affect their sites and pages. Google has been piloting this Policy Center with thousands of AdSense publishers, who have been very positive about these changes—and provided great feedback and suggestions on how to make the Policy Center more useful.

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 Google when policy issues have been resolved and their pages are ready for review.

Later this year, Google will be adding policy centers in other publisher platforms in addition to AdSense.

With this launch, Google is  moving two steps closer to their goal of making it easier to understand how our policies work so that publishers can drive their businesses forward, using Google ad platforms.