I can't help what the event was called

Quite, but you can help what you do with your website ;)

I think that's known as 'learning the hard way'.

Still, now you know that their TOS aren't there for fun - and they haven't suspended your account this time!

I do want to use the actual name of the event next time, but I don't want the same thing to happen again.

And that's known as 'learning from your mistakes and repeating them exactly'.

I look forward to hearing how you get on :) :)

I suggest that you contact the event organisers and have them change the name. Much like I heard of the WebmasterWorld Publishers Conference long after the WebmasterWorld PubCon.

What?! I'd rather not have Google Ads on the site at all if this was the case.

Maybe put the event name in an image.

I think our options are pretty limited in these cases.

What?! I'd rather not have Google Ads on the site at all if this was the case.

By George He's Got It!

If you wish to promote events and activities that Adsense depracates, then you really do have to choose; if the events bring serious income, and Adsense is marginal, then don't try to 'get away with it' just choose an advertising service with more congenial TOS. It may even get you a bigger Ad income!

Meanwhile, read Adsense's TOS carefully, and see how you stand using it at other times and other places.

It was too late to change the directory name once I had done the mailout and all the ads were displaying when I first checked it.

Don't mean to seem harsh, but it wasn't too late. You just didn't want to change it and lose the benefit of your mailout.

If you wanted to profit from AdSense you knew the choice you needed to make and you didn't do it. Instead, AdSense made the choice for you apparently.

Life is like that. If you don't make a choice when one is needed, someone else will usually end up making the choice for you.

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By the way, how is it you are certain the name of this directory is what caused your probem and not something else? Did you get a direct correspondence from AdSense?

FarmBoy

You could easily retain the mailout traffic even if you did change the directory URL, simply by changing your on-page links to a 'cleaner' URL, and then using an internal rewrite to "re-connect" them to the original directory.

Or you could change the on-page links *and* the directory name, and re-write or redirect the mail-out URLs to that new directory.

Profanity has no place in professional advertising. It offends people, can cause extremely-serious problems with COPA (U.S. Federal law), and can draw lawsuits. The event organizers, not Google, are to blame.

Jim

The word that Google had so much trouble with was "kinky"

You'll know next time ;)

I have run adsense on a lingerie directory for over 2 years, in the beginning the word 'sexy' was causing public service ads, also some of the sites that were listed had no bad content / words in the directory but G was apparently scanning the sites the directory linked out to!

[edited by: jatar_k at 1:54 am (utc) on Oct. 5, 2008]

I have several pages which do not bear the word "sexy" at all yet half the AdSense ads do and I have seen a few AdSense ads that have offended my sensibilities because of where they appeared. When your double standard is applied by an algorithm you often get some bizarre results.

That being said, when Google's AdSense TOS standards are set you've got to live (or die) by them even when they are accidentally or genuinely goofy.

Strangely enough, another website has a profanity has part of the domain name, yet Google AdSense still displays the ads on the site.

You can't play that game...I've run across many sites that are clearly breaking Adsense TOS and have huge traffic numbers. I've reported them and nothing happens. Sometimes I think Google turns the other way for certain people.

There are some parts of my site that I held off putting AdSense on for years as I thought it wouldn't work or I wouldn't be allowed to use there. I am not trying to do anything underhand or rip people off. There is a lot of useful content on my website and I give away a lot of things for free.

Updated the directory and the ads were viewable right away. Hopefully the 301 redirect doesn't cause any problems.

It turns out it was the directory name specifically that was throwing the PSA's. Once I changed that all the ads appeared as if by magic. I worked this out as it happened again with a new gallery I was working on.

Now that I know what it is I will go back and change the workaround for the first one as it looks a bit spammy.

I agree with just doing the redirection to a new page as mentioned ealier as a quick fix.
Those are some pretty mundane terms. On our site we had/have some pages which describe entertainment shows of the burlesque nature and even some which include nudity and partial stripping (in a totally legal venue for the location of course - some other societies may have a problem with them, but they are not performed there). None of the pages showed anything above PG rating on the site itself. When the pages first went up apparently some keywords were triggered and we got no Ads or PSAs. But a quick "help" note to Adsense with a brief explanation and the URLs had them working just fine in hours and ever since (with ads actually promoting the particular shows as well). GAd apparently has a manual override for such cases, drop them a line.

It turns out it was the directory name specifically that was throwing the PSA's

One of my big complaints about Google is the priority they give to words in the URL. Often this results in very poorly targetted ads and there's not much one can do about it.

I also tend to have different ads displayed when I check the site on my computer to when it is on my website. My domain name must be over-riding the ads except for some cases.

RRRR! Someone from the Adsense team must have read these posts and turned the ads off again.