Google's policy against clicking AdSense ads on your own website continues to annoy me. This time, it was a post on the Inside AdSense blog that drew my ire:

However, we strongly advise against using your own AdSense for search box for a couple of reasons. First, it can increase the chance of accidental or invalid clicks on the ads that appear on the search results pages. Second, this will inflate the number of queries in your reports, giving you an inaccurate picture of the activity on your site.

I search the archives of this site almost daily in search of relevant links to things I've written about previously. I'd hate to see this site's AdSense income wiped out due to clicking on ads served to me based on what I searched for just because they were served on my own site.

The ads site-search ads are, obviously, highly relevant to what I searched for, so clicking makes sense.

Google's policy of discouraging clicking ads they serve against my own searches makes my site less usable for me.

As I've mentioned before, Google needs to come up with a setting that allows users to claim their own sites, then simply not compensate the site owner for clicks they generate themselves. This would make site owner's own sites more valuable to themselves and benefit Google's advertisers who would receive more traffic from site owners who could click with confidence.

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