Blogs and Google Adsense go hand-in-hand. In case you’re not familiar with Google Adsense, it’s the advertising program sponsored by Google that allows site owners to put those little ad boxes along the margins, headers and footers of websites. Webmasters earn revenue from the clicks on the ad links. The type of ads that appear on a site depend on the content of the page and Google’s technology serves up ads that it thinks are relevant to the topic of the page based on various keywords and phrases. Most site owners use Adsense as a way to defer costs of maintaining the site (as is the case with Common Sense Democracy). One of things I find quite amusing is to watch the types of ads that are being served to my sites change based on what I’m blogging about that week. This brings me to the point of this post. This week the story broke on the Watergate’s “Deep Throat” and I posted several references to the news with various links to other sources. Shortly after, the Google Adsense ads stopped appearing on the home page of this site. This is not unusual, as occassionally the druids over at Google play with the algorithms that cause blips across the universe. What is unusual is the lengh of time the ads have not appeared. Digging deeping into other pages, I realized that the ads are showing in other areas, which rules out the argument that Common Sense Democracy was being somehow blocked or reindexed in it’s entirety. One conclusion I came up with was that Google just simply didn’t like the term “Deep Throat”. Perhaps their engines have determined this term to be profanity and so the ads are filtered on any page referencing this content.

Anyway, it’s just a theory. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who has experienced this phenomenon.

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