Adsense Stop Words Fiasco

[thehobbster]

Adsense Stop Words Fiasco

I noticed quite a while back that my best earning Adsense site had three pages on it that were no longer showing ads. I gave it no mind and thought that perhaps there just weren't any relevant ads at the time. It didn't occur to me at the moment that all the other pages were on the same topic and were showing ads. Once that clicked, I had to get to the bottom of this...

Mission: Get The Ads To Show began in full force and took two days to resolve. I checked the plug-in code. I made sure I had the right amount of ads showing. I created new ad blocks to replace the old ones. I cleared my browser's cache. I tried Explorer, Safari, Firefox. Finally, I considered adsense stop words.

What are Adsense Stop Words?
Stop words are keywords that tells the Adsense bot to halt and not serve ads to that page. Examples of these words are ones relating to death, illicit drugs, racism, pornography, etc. Stuff that's not family friendly. Well, my site pertains to one of those topics but in a positive manner. And heck, Adwords has tons of advertisers for it. So I fine-tooth combed through the pages and saw a few things that could have tripped the bot. So I took those words out. No luck.

I found that if I added a parameter to the end of my url, such as "?x" that it would again serve the ads. So what the heck. In the end, I went through this ad troubleshooter Adsense has out there, and it asked me a ton of questions and ultimately decided to have me contact them. I hesitated because I have waited weeks for replies. I hate that game. But I told them what I suspected was going on with the bot and within two hours they replied with something like...

"Yep. You were right to suspect our bot filtered your three url's. We have manually reviewed them and manually removed them from the ban list. We have also whitelisted your whole domain. You are good to go!"

The Result
I was thrilled. Immediately my ads were showing. So that goes to show you. So much of Google's operations have zero human involvement. Be careful what you do. You aren't fighting human intellect, but robotic intelligence, and the people don't get involved until you force them to with either a request or some kind of operations they don't like.

But if you are conducting your business as a business and not a fly-by-night get-rich-quick scheme, you should be fine. There will be times when you need the Google employees to take a look at your sites with human eyeballs. Be prepared, because it can be a matter earning much more in revenue!

Originally Posted on March 16, 2011 on