There's a post on the AdSense blog this week that discusses the recent decision to ban the use of graphics next to the Google ads that appear on your page. Images next to ads has long been a controversial practice with Google stating that publishers could use images as long as they were not directly associated with the content of the ad text. Nonetheless, publishers liked to push the rule as far as they could and even I occasionally found myself clicking on an ad because I thought I was clicking an internal site link.

Google offers up the following image as an example of what falls within the "no-no" category...

I have to say that the image shown is pretty tame compared to some I've seen. I've been pretty impressed at how some site owners have been able to integrate the ads so seamlessly that you have to hunt for Ads by Google text to know that they really are ads. I imagine that these new rules will help weed out some of the sites that simply offer up junk content as a way to run visitors through the ads. That said, it will likely also cause some problems for publishers that currently use graphics without really intending to game the system.

It's also important to note that the new guidelines don't mean that a page with AdSense ads must be devoid of images. From the AdSense team: