Blackhat SEO: For all the bad ideas I have…

Adsense Rounded Corners Lack Thoughful Design

Posted in Adsense by Elliott Back on July 1st, 2007.

Google has a new way to show Adsense, in different kinds of rounded boxes now.  Presumably, this is to help their advertisements blend better with the newer style of Web 2.0 sites we’re seeing more of of.  There are three levels of rounding available, but the text is poorly layed out inside the ad block:

adsense-poor.png

See how it mashes into the right edge and almost runs off the left?  A little padding can set this frame right:

adsense-corrected.png

This could significantly improve your CTR, but Google will have to fix it on their end, as it’s against the TOS for us to do it :(