In case you have not noticed, off to the left of this site are two small ads served by Google AdSense. If I was asked why I put them there, it was mostly an exercise to see how they worked, what it takes to set them up, and to generally get a fell for the Google AdSense system.

When I first set up the site, I was lacking on categories. While one can easily argue I still am, and have a haphazard way of categorizing stuff, the fact remained I was short on something to stuff over there. The ads sort of “fit” and don’t take away from the site, so they were added in. In case you were wondering, AdSense is very easy to set up.

I should also mention, I have not made a single penny off of the ads, though the sheer amount of times they are clicked on is a bit perplexing. More perplexing, is that they rarely seem to change. I consistently have the same two ads served, both to blog hosting sites.

I have had run-ins with Google support in the past, so I figured, what they heck, I will drop them a line. For a company so large, they are superbly responsive to technical support inquires.

I have been posting to my blog for a while now, without fail, 90% of the time, I get adsense ads linking to blogging companies. As you can see, there is never a mention of the word blog in my posts, only at the top is the title:
“three clicks and a drag… A Kurt Moore blog”

It is starting to bum me out, is there no way to limit words from the
served ads? I see I can block urls, but thats not a game I want to play.

I got a quick human reply telling me they were working on it, and a second one that finally gave me the real answer. If you have not figured it out yet, the ads are generated automatically. In essence, your content determines the ads. If you write about rebuilding exhaust manifolds, chances are, you are going to get ads served up with links to topics that are similar. My problem was that did not seem to be the case.

And here is the skinny. If you use “objectionable” words in your posts, or to put it in Google speak:

…potentially mature language and/or profanity…

…your served up ads will always be the same, or at least lean on the side of extremely off topic and generic. Kind of a bummer. I have limited my total posts per main page to a smaller number, in hopes my potty mouth gets rolled off sooner rather than later, to date, it’s not working to well.

While it’s not a big deal, it is curious. Google is being a wee bit one sided on this, as it’s certainly not the case that they won’t ever link to mature content, as these searches illustrate:

• vagina
• horny girls
• teen porn

Clearly, there are Google ads off to the right of the page. The difference here, those ads are paid for. So Google has no issue with mature content so long as they are making the bang on that buck. To me, it’s silly, there is a ton of good content out there, sometimes, you really need a well placed fuck or whore dropped in for literary completeness. And yeah, I am stretching in that this blog is hardly “good content”, let alone worthy literary content, but for fuck’s sake, filter out the bad words, and use the remaining good ones to generate your ad linking structure. Sure, if a certain threshold is hit, and more than x% of your content is profane in nature, kick in the blacklist, otherwise, use the filter wisely.