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Our site and Google AdSense
Like so many sites, we use AdSense to generate income through this web site. And some of the things we do are to make sure we stay in compliance with the AdSense policies.
This site comes in two flavors. Desktop and Mobile. We get many thousands of visitors each day. Not just page views, but unique visitors. A very small portion of the visitors click on the ads seen on our site and for each of those, we get a few cents.
This doesn't make us rich but it sure helps to pay the bills aournd here. We have several servers that require maintenance and use power.
In order to keep these adds in place, we are required to follow a set of policies set forth by Google just like all the other sites that display AdSense advertisements. Staying in compliance isn't always easy.
We actually fell out of comliance during late September 2012 but we correct the problem in early October and we are good as gold now and our ads are back in place and working for us to keep the site running.
What happened? Well as you can imagine, with millions of products in our database, some are bound to be adult in nature. We didn't have strong enough protections in place to keep the average casual user from getting to these items. And we didn't have our site blocking advertising on these pages either. Google dinged us mainly because their ads were on the pages that had adult item infomation and that is a policy violation so they turned off all ads for our mobile site.
How did we fix it? We took two steps. First we made sure that ads didn't display on items of an adult nature. We can't catch them all but when we spot one we mark it so ads won't be displayed. We also went a little further and made these items invisible to users that don't specifically say they are 18 years old and want to see the item details. This extra step was mainly our own idea and offers us the abailty to stop kids from accidentally browsing to those pages. Of course, someone coule lie to us about their age but at least they wont' get to the page by accident and freak out. This is really good for people that use our site for work research. They probably don't want that type of stuff popping up by accident.
In any case, we do our best to keep the site in compliance with Google AdSense policies. If you see something that looks questionable, please feel free to let us know and we will investigate quickly.