Metafilter’s founder Matt Haughey has written an article going into greater detail about the site’s troubles with Google and its ad programmes. One thing struck me:
Over the course of 2013, a series of messages from the Adsense team hit me with varying degrees of severity. We were temporarily banned from the system due to some text questions talking about sexual health (questions from users that include terms for body parts etc., but Google interprets that as the site being “adult”) and had to greatly beef up our ad display blocking by subject matter.
This seems typical American to me, that obsession with making sure something isn’t porn. It doesn’t usually hurt actual porn sites because these use more specialised ad services, but does hurt sites like MeFi that can talk honestly about sex (among others) or worse, actual sex education sites. (These sort of shenanigans can hit actual sex workers even worse; e.g. Eden Alexander and her troubles with Wepay.
In general this sort of problem is caused because Google’s algorithms for which are a proper site and which an evil SEO farm are not good enough to actually do so with any degree of accuracy, hence long existing sites like Mefi (and, it wouldn’t surprise me, this site too) are caught in the crossfire. Google doesn’t care enough for this sort of collatoral damage to let actual humans judge, so the only thing Metafilter can do is either try and adapt to Google’s abritary rules, or find ways to lessen it dependence on Google.vMefi is now trying the latter.
My own blog is luckily only a hobby, not a business, but it does worry me how much Google is screwing around with my visibility; few enough people visit as it is…
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