One of the subjects that has been talked a lot on several forums is the placement of images near Adsense Ads. There’s been some confusion on this issue, and so Google decided to ask the policy team to set the record straight. When asked : Can I place small images next to my Google ads? Google answers like this:

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers. Publishers should also be careful to avoid similar implementations that people could find misleading. For instance, if your site contains a directory of Flash games, you should not format the ads to mimic the game descriptions. If the ads and the images appear to be associated, inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads will not make the implementation compliant.

Google just want to make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. So this is some bad news for publishers hoping improve click-through rates by placing images next to Google ads. There are some publishers that are already using some scripts to automatically place these images and change them randomly (Adsense Beautifier plugin for Wordpress) . So this new police clarification can lead to banning some accounts. I also think that with this new statement and only one or two examples of ad placement next to pictures the policy is not totally clarified. Let’s see what happen in the next months… more information here.