AdSense and I have enjoyed a fantastic working relationship over the span of half a year or so. I haven’t made much money off of it, but that’s not really the point. I think having some AdSense units embedded on my site actually makes it look a bit more professional, and AdSense saves me the work having to hunt down advertisers to get them to slap some banners on this site.

But honestly, AdSense has been pissing me off lately. I don’t give a damn what ads people click on when they’re on my site, but I hate it when I see crap like “Adventure Quest, FREE RPG” being advertised on the banner of my site. In fact, I hate it when any of the following things make it onto the banners on Marketing Ninja:

• Dating Sites
• Obvious Scams
• MPE or Male Enhancement
• System Registry Cleaner (hope you like spyware!)
• Stupid Online Games

I dislike all of those things because I don’t feel that those ads represent the interests of my audience nor do they represent my blog.

So what have I done to take care of those sites?

The only I thing I can do, which is to say that I’ve dumped URLs of offending websites into my “competitive sites” filter for AdSense. If there are any Google Accounts executives reading this, please note that I obviously am not competing with FilipinoDating.com nor any of the other sites that share FilipinoDating’s high honors in the Marketing-Ninja competitive filter.

So I ask AdSense, why not give us a “topical filter” to weed out advertisements that bear little relevance to the interests of people who come to this site?

Right now I can filter site-targeted advertisements (there are none here,) but I can’t do much about the untargeted ads. I would love something that would let me  specify a preference as to what kind of content can be displayed in any advertisements on my site.

Think of it this way - a topical filter would increase the utility of the advertiser’s AdSense impressions; if site owners could say “hey, my site is about XYZ” it could fill in a lot of the intelligence that the AdSense contextual engine apparently lacks. 

Update: In the middle of writing this article Marketing Ninja’s banner AdSense unit displayed an advertisement that said something along the lines of “Do It Donkey Style.” Seriously, Google, please give me something that can cut this crap off of my site or I’m going to ditch the AdSense altogether.

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