Or, “How Not to Get the Dreaded PSAs (Public Service Announcements).”

As a webmaster, I learned some good lessons recently about Adsense’s over-sensitivity to certain words. Immediately upon publishing a page about mesothelioma, a specific type of cancer, the Adsense ads were replaced with PSAs. No matter what I did, it seemed that I was getting the PSAs. Now I knew that “mesothelioma” is one of the highest paying adwords due to all the mesothelioma litigation that has been going on– So I knew the ads were out there! I tried checking if my domain was blocked by Google due to the previous owners’ actions, by using Google Webmaster Tools (appparently it will tell you if your domain is blocked, and it wasn’t). Some further research revealed that Google bots scan the page for certain “stop words” that when found will block any paid advertisements from being displayed on a particular web page.

Apparently Google faced some criticism from disturbed web page viewers when it inadvertently served ads for luggage to an article about a dismembered body found in a suitcase. Ouch. While I can certainly understand why they would want to prevent this from happening again (and especially why Gucci & Samsonite would want to prevent this from happening again), what I do not understand is why Google fails to reveal these key “stop words” to their publishers.

Now you might be wondering what the offensive word was… It was “cancer.” Yes, really. Apparently “disease” is OK, but not “cancer.” And nevermind that almost all the ads that get served say “cancer” in them! I even had to take out links to two of the most respected cancer sites on the internet: cancer.gov and cancer.org!! Even if the text did not say “cancer,” the URL was enough to offend the Google Gods. Sigh. Far be it from me to criticize Google — Perhaps they are still perfecting this technology. This site helped me locate the offending word: Finding Stop Words. Don’t ask me how they got their list of key words (probably painstaking trial and error), because Google’s lips are sealed.

Once you’ve published a page and it has been found to contain one or more “stop words,” the PSAs appear immediately. Simply changing the wording will not help at this point, as it takes an undisclosed amount of days for your page to be re-checked by the damn Google bots (I tested three days later and it is still blocked). Since I loaded my page as “index.html” I was screwed. After finding and replacing the “offending” words, I tried renaming it to “index.htm” but that didn’t help. Then I tried “test.html” and I got ads. Hmmph. So I redesigned the site with a splash page as the index, and that seemed to work out really well anyhow. Actually it helped me realize another thing: Google is assigning a large weight to the name of the actual html file. When I uploaded the page about mesothelioma as “test.html” I got ads about SAT Tests!! Seriously. I gotta tell you it took me a few thinks to make that connection. So I got wise and renamed it to “mesothelioma.html” and bingo! Lesson here: Always upload your pages with a temporary file name to test whether ads get served! If there are PSAs, there is probably something wrong. Ads for anything else, however strange, is a go.

Now, ways to get around this… I can think of two. One, put the offending words (or whole paragraph) in an image file. The other way is to use a Javascript to display the text, as currently Google bots do not execute the Javascript and therefore ignore the resulting text (However, I don’t know if this will change in the future). With a Javascript, it would be possible to have the text appear perfectly normal to the user, whereas if you have a block of text and only the word “cancer” is a graphic, for example, that might look strange, at least in some browsers, inevitably. On the other hand, Javascripts sometimes take a while to load. Flash may be an option as well, but I have not tested that. Now, if the words are actually offensive, and not just “offensive to the bots” then a real human at Google may end up blocking your page, due to a complaint, or random chance. Furthermore, I understand that chronic abusers get their entire domains blocked, and naturally you can get kicked out of Adsense altogether. Of course I do not recommend that; if you want to display Adsense, your site should have a professional tone.

To that point, and since I am not using Adsense on this blog, I am free to say whatever the hell I want (well, within reason). So if you found this helpful, put some love in my daggone coffee cup.