New 2×2 Google Adsense Ad Units

Today I saw a strange new Adsense unit on our blog. Our single posts feature a 336×280px Google adsense unit below the title, and instead of the usual 4 text links and descriptions aligned one below the other, the 4 text links were arranged in a 2×2 box pattern.

Filling up ad space using 2×2 ad units is common practice to get more clicks. Many webmasters used to place two 468×60px banner units one above the other or use two 200×200px units side by side to get the same effect of displaying 2×2 boxes of 4 ads together which is a good optimization of ad space. Probably Google is running a test run to see how these ads are clicked.

BTW those arrows are ‘next’ and ‘previous’ arrow buttons - When a user clicks on the ‘next’ button, an entirely new group of ads will appear in the ad unit, giving your users greater control over the ads they see and click.

We have spotted strange Google Adsense ads before also - You can check out are ads with favicons, no titles, titles in italics and no “Ads by Google” and interactive keywords.