Web Blog of Greg Mathews

Adsense warning

I spoke too soon last week, or thought I may have done anyway.

On Friday I received an email from the Adsense team, yet again complaining that the site contains ‘mature content’. I thought that I had solved this problem by blocking words, but obviously not.

Adsense gave me 72 hours to remove the mature content or they will stop serving ads on the site. Now, the site Bookmarkcenter.com is a Meta Search engine, so a visitor uses the site to search the web.

I had to act quickly, I don’t want to loose my adsense earnings. Firstly I found a list of ‘bad words’ that someone had created, this contained a list of about 400 words, compared to the list of about 20 I had previously, so impletented the new list. This initially meant that if someones search phrase contained 2 or more of these bad words the search would not be carried out. It also mean that if these words appeared in the output they would be censored.

This was great but then it lead to another problem, many of the searches carried out are foriegn, Malaysia, Indonesia and India are the major ones and these searches where in many cases in their native tongue. Heck I can’t speak these languages, how do I block the mature content in those searches.

I introduced another script, it runs behind the scenes and checks the language of each recent search, if non English it attempts to translate the search term. If the English translation then contains any ‘bad words’ the search is removed from the database.

I hate censorship, and I could have decided to just remove the Adsense ads from the pages with ‘mature content’ but I am sure that as the site generally has Adsense ads Google could still get upset and at the end of the day the site is there to make me money, or at least pay for the hardware it uses.

What I have found also is that now my page impressions have dropped drastically, but at the same time my Adsense eCPM and Clickthru has gone increased.

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