that site is fine no TOS problems just good placement of adsense

Thanks for the advice Raven, you just prove the point I need to learn more about the TOS to be a bit more daring.

Thanks John for that tip.

Just for clarity, I was actually referring to ads that appears to be traditional Navigation Bars and if Adsense would consider it border line tricking the average surfing idiot like me to click on an ad when thinking they were clicking on a page of that site.
It seems this practice is all ok. The owner of this site, I believe is very experienced in Adsense, so I would expect he to know where the boundies are.

Yea that's fine.

Hey Ducksauce!

That's our site we were selling, actually...thanks for finding us and pointing it out! We were a bit unsure as to what we should or shouldn't be using several months ago as well. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity (My biz partner Joe was, at least) to sit down with an AdSense rep and do a little one-on-one, going over our sites, ad placement, etc. She mentioned that our placement was "aggressive" a bit, but that it's fine. You can read more about that exchange on one of the pages here:

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...che-sites.html

Ultimately, the CTR and CPC from that ad block is surprisingly low...so much so that we've considered dumping it altogether hoping it would increase clicks elsewhere. We decided to keep it because, ultimately, we don't think it would make a large enough difference either way to justify making the change across our host of sites.

It's true that you don't want to "trick" users into clicking ads. Ultimately, you want a large percentage of your users actually buying from the end advertiser...that makes everyone happy!