I have nearly finished setting up a page on this blog that contains all of the publisher programs and companies I work with for use on my forums and blogs that I will be publishing this weekend. Obviously, one of the publisher programs that will be on the site is Google Adsense and because I wasn’t sure if they allowed URL redirects for their referral links I decided to contact them. I thought John Chow had URL redirects for his Adsense referral, but upon clicking the link it simply goes to a blank page that says “Sign up for Adsense.” Either way, I contacted Google before I discovered that John was not using URL redirects and I thought at the time it’d be best to contact them for permission would just to be sure. I received a reply the next day and to my surprise, Google does not allow URL redirects for it’s affiliate program links! And the day I wrote this post I clicked his link to see if it was a URL redirect and found out it wasn’t. Either way, I think there is an important lesson to be learned:

Always ask your publisher program before implementing some ad code that may be questionable. It’s important to make sure you comply to their guidelines or you may lose out on a lot of money if your account gets canceled over something that could have been avoided by simply asking a question.

Did you know they don’t allow URL redirects for Adsense referrals?