Has Google contacted you about an ad in the first post violating Adsense terms?

I don't personally use ads in the posbit but in the last couple days I've seen at least 1 user of vBulletin.com forums and 1 user on XenForo.com forums complaining that Google sent them an email they have 72 hours to bring their site into compliance or they would stop serving adsense ads.

In both cases it seems to be the ad they have in the first post, even though it is off to the side Google think it looks too much like legit content.

I suspect these people have set the colors for text-based ads to look as much like normal forum content as possible, but I am not sure since I never see text ads. I'm wondering if anyone else has got hit with this yet, and if so, are your text ads blended into the page?

This seems like a major change from Google- I know the first ad post location was specifically approved/OKed by Google back in the day when ad locations and Google Adsense integration was first added to vBulletin.

 

No letters here.

 

Did those email from Google actually specify the ad in the first post as the reason?

 

You have to be careful of phishing efforts. If I received something like this in my email, I would go to the Google Adsense page and see if there is some sort of notification on my account. If not, I would call them to confirm before taking the email seriously, especially if the email requires info from me.

 

It's not a phishing attempt because they aren't asking people to click anything. They do not specify the first post ad, only an example URL.

 

What's the sample url? Show us and we might be able to help figure it out.