I have had a lot of difficulty with our Adwords showing up on thousands of "banned" keyword domain names.
Just so everone is clear, certain keyword names and phrases have been deemed "banned", "illegal use" by all credit card processors and credit card fulfillment companies. You probaly know the ones, they start with Ch,Pe,Lo and Pre.
If you refer sales from one of these domain names, you will have your Credit card merchant account closed or your affiliate account closed and have to fight to recover past earned sale and commisions.
Problem is when you send traffic from Google Adwords via Adsence the referer sent is the page that your Adwords appered on. So if your Adwords was on bigbadsite.com that is the referer seen by your processor or Afiliate program
Consequently, I have found a major flaw in both Google Adwords and AdSense for domains.
Sorry, for the long post, however this is going to be very important information if you use Adwords, even if you are selling something as generic as cars etc. If you are selling Porno it is even worse for you as the referers are watched even more closely.
1)
First flaw in Adwords is that if you try to ustilize negative keyword to stop ads from showing up on unwanted or "banned keywords" it will only ban the exact keyword. It will not ban the keyword if it is hidden in a domain name with hyphens. Thus if you have a negative keyword of "foul" it will still show ads on foul-foul.com or foul.bad.com. They have no wildcard feature.
This makes impossible to stop receiving traffic from spamers using Adsence against your negative keywords and robbing your pocketbook. It also can subject your company to serious repercussions from your client base.
I have seen Major company ads showing up on "banned Keyword" domains. I have not posted the domain names as the names are very nasty and the moderators will complain.
It also does not help to try and use Site Exclusions because you are limited to 25 and most spamers use thousands of domain names.
One major player has registered what appears to be over over 300,000 domain names. It almost looks like they knew which misspellings and unusual porn names received clicks on Google.
They appear to have parked them with AdSense for domains.
2)
I have given Google Adsence hundreds of examples of this parties breach of the terms of service sending traffic from not only porn names but "banned" porn names.
I have asked them to block that persons account from sending me traffic they say they can not do that. All they do it stop the Adwords from appearing on just the domain names that I keep sending them every day after I check my refferer logs at one of my main Sponsors.
They refuse to kill this parties account eventhough they continue to send traffic from "banned names"
All they do is kill the individual sites from showing Adwords after a couple of days. However they leave up all the other sites.
I guess they must make Google a real pile of money.
Lately I have seen many Adword links from those domains with their account terminated with CCbill. Probaly for sending traffic from a :banned domain" name. They have zero tolerance for this al it takes is one referral and your account can be terminated.
So watch out.
That brings me to my final flaw in Google Adsence they obviously do not monitor the domains that are being added to a AdSense for domains account. How could so many hundreds maybe thousands of "banned domain" names get put in the program.
This is a major flaw that lets all Adwords advertisers down who relied upon Google to only show their ads on acceptable standards site.
How would you like to be a major corporation with your ads showing on a site call pe**sex.com
I have a list of hundreds of "banned" domains that are on the Google AdSense for domains program. I find hundreds more each day, they are all owned by the same company.
Google told me again today for the six time do not worry they are still working on it. They should have cancelled the account when I first beought it to their attention three weeks ago.
The traffic lands on very clever Search page with Adsence ads and multple categories.
For those interested I can email; you a partial list of sample domains for verification of Google Adsence
and Whois ownership.
This is just a heads up for all you Adwords adverisers but and urgent warning for any aAdult webmasters using Adwords.
I just had a thought, maybe they have not registered the domains with Adsence for domains.
They could be just putting their Adsence code on the domains without approval from Google.
But looking at the websites it would require some pretty sofisticated code to run the search module they utilize.
That would be another explaination how they could get the domains to show Adsence ads and bypass approval process.
It does not change the problem discussed or explain why they did not take down this parties Adsence account for clear and multiple breaches of the terms of service.
It only offers another plausible explanation that removes Google's responsibility for allowing the Ads on the domains. It does seem hard to beleive that Google does not monitor the domain names allowed to be part of Adsence for domains.
Let's make sure we discuss the issue in general and avoid getting into specific please.
Onya
Woz
I dug a little deeper, and "adult" related domain names are not excluded from Domain Park, like I would have expected them to be. The only site restrictions [google.com] are:
Domain names submitted to may not contain or link to any of the following content: Any illegal activity; site promotion of incentive or fraudulent clicking; violation of trademark (and related rights), copyright, trade secret, patent or other intellectual property right of any third party; software which contains a virus, worm or other code that could be damaging or harmful to a user's computer system or stored information; libelous, defamatory, obscene or hateful content; or any subject matter not in line with Google policy.
I was pretty surprised by that. I suppose "any subject matter not in line with Google policy" could cover adult content, but that is pretty vague, and does not specifically spell out adult like on the AdSense policies, for example. Or perhaps it is a "by discretion" which is why he is seeing domains being removed one at a time as he reports them, rather than Google banning the account outright.
You cannot opt-out of Domain Park by opting out of content network, but I can't remember if opting out of the search network will prevent those ads from showing on domain park sites.
There should definitely be some filter in place where ads are only shown on "adult" domain park websites if an advertiser opts-in to that. If not, allow wildcard domain name filtering so individual publishers can combat the problem.
However, I've seen an example where the program looks like domain parking, the advertiser has not opted into content match, and yet their ads appeared on these adult looking parked sites. (it also looked like there was some cloaking, encryption, and more stuff was going on that my tech expertise could understand).
The last time this happened was quite a while ago, and a detailed email to G did correct the problems (I don't know the action they took other than this client disappeared from these sites).
Remember the important thing that I stated.
I am not so much concerned that my Adwords are appearing on Adult domains. (Although that is a debate on its own)
It is the fact that the Adult domains inquestion are using "banned keywords" in their domain name.
This can cause an Adwords advertiser to loose their Visa merchant account and Afiliate accounts.
These domain names will cause serious damage to a companies reputation through adverse association withe the domain names.
