I have what may be a bit of a unique situation. I run a pool care website. It's one of those industries where there are a lot of snake oil salesman and a lot of junk products out there.

Generally speaking, members of the site have been pretty vocal about avoiding many of these products. Now, with adsense running, I'm seeing some ads appear on my site from these very same companies. I know that I can block ads, and I'm willing to do that, but I don't want to have to be policing the ads all the time, nor do I want to be constantly contacted about which ads people think I should not run.

I just started the ads yesterday and have made no mention of it in the public areas of the site, but based on some feedback from my mods, I'm considering giving a sort of warning about the ads themselves. Obviously, I don't want to violate the google TOS. I'm thinking something along the lines of letting users know that while the ads are targeted and will hopefully provide some useful links, they are not selected by me and no specific endcorsement is given to any product or retailer and as with any advertisement, caution should be used and that they should ask questions within the forum before making any purchases of new products.

Does that sound reasonable or am I just asking for problems by posting this at all. It often seems that I only get complaints about changes I have made only after I ask for feedback. I think for the most part, people get used to the changes and won't necessarily complain unless given an oportunity to do so. Of course I could always just lock the post after I make it so it doesn't invite discussion.

Thoughts? Anyone else run into this?

A small disclaimer is always acceptable, something like "We have no control over the content in our advertisements or over external sites" Perhaps place it in a link in the footer as part of your TOS.

Jamie

I don't think this would be a problem towards the big G.

What they don't want is you trying to boost your click ratio by telling your users to click sponsors ads.
I'm fairly sure they would not complain if you asked your users NOT to click the ads...

But the safest way to know for sure would be to ask the adsense team directly.
I know they are pretty open for those questions.

Originally Posted by tripy

I don't think this would be a problem towards the big G.

What they don't want is you trying to boost your click ratio by telling your users to click sponsors ads.
I'm fairly sure they would not complain if you asked your users NOT to click the ads...

But the safest way to know for sure would be to ask the adsense team directly.
I know they are pretty open for those questions.

Thanks, I'll do that.

Chances are, they'll say the same thing that I'm about to, only more Adsensical.

1) Add a legal section to your website.

2) Write about how any advice given is strictly advice and that you assume no liability for any damage or loss caused by use of this site or the advice (you should be doing this anyway, since you never know when some random idiot is going to suggest drinking chlorine as a means of testing its safety level or something like that. Always cover your *** against the terminally stupid...you never know when Darwin will be proven wrong next.)

3) Indicate in the legal section that advertisements are served by Google and are paid for by third parties whose sites you have no control over and therefore will assume no responsibility for. You might want to do this with any forum-posted external links as well.

This way, you don't negatively impact your CTR, you've still explained things clearly, and you've actually enhanced the user experience in the process by defining legal terms and letting them know what to be aware of.