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April 3, 2008
I was reading around my Google Adsense webmaster termsthis morning… who knows, maybe I was just bored, but I found that on March 3rd, they made a change which requires all publishers to have a Privacy Policy on websites that display AdSense ads.
In Section 1
You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.
Rochelle - I should have listened to you sooner! :-)
So now comes the big question; How do I incorporate a privacy policy across MANY domains in the shortest amount of time? Since we are already updating our websites, it only makes sense to write a single policy, change the domain name and replicate it across all domains. I found this quick and easy privacy policy generator, made specifically for Google, that allows you to at least write the policy!
To generate a policy page, just complete the form and press submit! I chose to check off EVERY ad program available, to avoid having to revisit and do it in the future, should I decide to use one of the listed services. MAKE SURE you check the box for using cookies, all of our BANS sites DO use cookies!
On the Hybrid Golf Clubsite, I simply added a new Content Page, pasted the generated text into the content section, completed the title, keywords, link title and file name sections. Once the page was in the main menu, I changed it from active to inactive in the admin, and linked to it in the footer.php template of the site.
I learned that even if the page is set as inactive for menu purposes, you can still link to it and show it on the site! :-) Once I was completely done, I saved the content of the Privacy Policy to a text file I will use on all sites from here forward!
After reading a bit more about the privacy policy and the duplicate content issue, it is commonly agreed that it makes no difference with this page. Also, Google may have a hard time finding it and verifying the existence if it is blocked in the robots.txt file.
During my travels on the subject, I also ran across another thing that may leverage your site ranking, a “Contact Us” page! More on that tomorrow!
Link to second post in this subject: Adding the Privacy Policy to Build a Niche Store
Rochelle also has a post on her site about the Privacy Policy for BANS.
5 Responses to “Privacy Policy More than just a Good Idea!”
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Hello Mark,
1.) Could you explain a bit about how you linked it to the footer.php.
I haven’t a clue about how I would do that. It’s probably really obvious but ….
2.) Also, I was wondering if we should add eBay onto the list of advertising partners. It seems like we should.
Thanks,
Virginia
@ Virginia -
I will have a video posted within the next 30 minutes on this.
The code for adding the link to your footer will be in the post, if I put it here… you will only see the link. :-)
Mark
To block it from google in the robots.txt file do we put it in like this?
Disallow: http://www.sitename/sitepolicy
@ Sonia -
You DO NOT want to block this in your htaccess… googlebot wont find it if you do!
Mark
I guess I misunderstood when you said,
“Also, Google may have a hard time finding it and verifying the existence if it is blocked in the robots.txt file.”
I thought that meant we should block it. I guess I need to learn more about the robots.txt file and htaccess, but I’m glad you told me not to - certainly not good if googlebot couldn’t find me! Thanks!