With many of our readers also being avid bloggers, I’m sure many of you have heard the debate over whether using MyBlogLog can get you banned from Adsense. Basically, Adsense doesn’t allow you to have third parties track your adsense clicks (or something along those lines), and MyBlogLog tracks just that. The issue’s been debated at least long enough that there’s no excuse for Google not to have an official stance, especially since the TOS for MyBlogLog don’t seem to mention anything about what they’re doing (unless I totally missed it … if so, correct me). So I emailed Google. Gotta love pathetic form responses:

Hi Jennifer,

Thank you for your question regarding MyBlogLog.

We do not endorse or encourage the use of any particular click tracking
tools. We recommend that you exercise caution when using third-party
software to ensure that you do not violate the AdSense Terms and
Conditions nor inadvertently disclose sensitive information about yourself
or your site through the use of such software.

In addition, it is solely your responsibility to verify that any tools or
software used in conjunction with AdSense do not violate the AdSense Terms
and Conditions and program policies.

For your reference, you can find tips and guidelines for keeping your
account in good standing by visiting our Help Center at

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23921.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help
Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center
for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on
the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group
).

Sincerely,

Becky
The Google AdSense Team

Fun stuff, right? So anyway, as much as I enjoy MyBlogLog, I’m making a judgement call and yanking it from SFW and any of my other blogs where it’s active. :( To be honest, I’m really not comfortable with them tracking what my visitors are doing on my sites, and really not comfortable with them tracking what I’m doing on other sites. I never use their stats… just keep it on the site so I can see your “smiling” faces every time I check my posts, and as a way of saying “Hey, real people read this blog!” :) But anyway, consider it gone.

It would certainly be nice if Google would get their act together and officially answer a question that probably affects quite a big chunk of bloggers, especially when it’s a prime opportunity to lash out at the behavior of one of their biggest competitors. Seriously….

So yeah. That’s that. Just figured I’d do the “nice” thing and share.