In the previous version of Google’s Feedburner and AdSense interface, it allowed you to add your Google AdSense ads to your RSS feed. You used to be able to disable them, however that is no longer possible. You’ve probably run into this problem if you’re reading this post. If you log into your Google AdSense and go to “My ads”, then click Feeds > Feed ads you will see all of your previous ads that you created for your Feedburner RSS feeds, but now the only thing that you can do is hide them from the interface. There’s actually no way to delete them.

Before the interface update, you were able to switch back to the old interface to delete them. Unfortunately, the old interface is no longer available to do so. But I’ve found a trick that effectively removes them from your RSS feeds–or at least it did for all the ones I tested this out on. Here’s how:

1. Logon to your Google AdSense account

2. Click on the “My ads” tab

3. Go to Feeds > Feed ads

4. Select the ad you wish to “disable”

5. Change “Post length” to “posts longer than approximately 500 words”

6. Change “Frequency” to “every 4th feed item”

What this does is makes it so the ads will only show up on feed items that contain 500 or more words. Now, if your feed contains stories longer than 500 words, they’ll show up. Thankfully none of mine do, especially since my WordPress installations typically use “Summary” mode for RSS feeds. And finally, if the ads do show up, they’ll show up only after every 4th feed item.

There’s still no way as of this time (April 24th, 2012) to turn them off outside of completely deleting your Feedburner feed and re-adding it. The problem here is that you will lose all of your subscribers. I haven’t personally tried this, but if Feedburner allows you to re-use the same Feed Address, then in theory, all of your subscribers should come right back.