I’ve been advertising with Google for a while, and I’ve added a few domains to my competitive ad filters over the years. I recently got a message from the AdSense folks telling me that I shouldn’t exclude those domains because they monetize well on my site. I don’t know why. Let’s take a look:
blogger.com - Probably does well because my site is often returned as the top entry for many “blogging” search terms.
datingfly.com - The first of a handful of dating sites to plaster their fannies on my site, I wouldn’t trust getting a date to the looks of this site, nor do I like the idea of hawking “love services” from my blog. Seems kind of skeezy.
perfectmatch.com - A competitor to the eHarmony dating site. I’m not really sure what the attraction for dating sites is to my blog.
philadelphiasingles.org - This dating site is interesting because it’s directed at people in my area. More about that after the list…
rojo.com - They are a web aggregator that upset me one day when I realized that it’s basically the Entertainment Tonight of aggregators, skimming the surface of web news and going no deeper.
savethechildren.org - I was getting tired of public service ads showing up on pages that Google didn’t know what to do with.
subscriptionsforsoldiers.com - At some point at the beginning of the Iraq conflict, these ads started showing up on very inappropriate posts.
thebiotechdictionary.com - My guess is that these guys mistakenly thought that buying ads on sites that had domains with terms that were the same as in their dictionary would increase their pagerank for those terms. Even though that’s not true, I didn’t want to help them redefine where Google points “Asymptomatic”.
thegayquiz.com - Hey, your lifestyle is your lifestyle and I respect that, but my mom (and other family) reads my blog, thanks. If dating sites aren’t cool, this fluff site certainly isn’t either.
typepad.com - Really, I have no idea why I blocked this domain.
Something I re-learned recently is that it’s pretty darn easy to correlate an IP address to a metropolitan region in the US. That’s how they manage to target ads to geographic places. Google actually seems to have narrowed the metro areas into the regions that most tools use to define what the region is. Or, worded in a less convoluted way, Google seems to have defined what metro regions are on the web. That’s kind of weird.
Anyway, I’ve unblocked all of those domains above. Today, I have stopped caring about that. Hopefully people find the services they advertise here useful.
Also, while I’m mentioning problem domains, I’ve been inundated with tons of 419 emails. They’re not from Nigeria, but they all have some bank money that they are unable to claim, and all seem to need my help to claim it. I must be very trustworthy if all these guys want me to handle their millions.
Each new email seems like a new variation. It’s a real pain. They’re sneaking by the spam filters pretty easily these days. I’m going to need to contact Webmail.us about it if the problem persists.
Still, by using a method I employ for registering accounts at different websites, I have found at least two sites that have either sold my email to the 419 people or have accidentally released my address to the world for 419’ers to pick up for spamming.
These two sites are justinvincent.com and colorlovers.com. I’m sad about this in both cases, since justinvincent.com has a really handy PHP database connection object that I use or emulate for nearly everything. And colorlovers.com is a pretty cool color palette selection site that I was kind of fond of.
Anyway, you’ll notice that I’m not linking to them above, just listing out their domains to shame them.
