Has 'casino' become a bad word?

It's the only word on the page I can find?

[Powdork]

My beaches page on a local directory has suddenly gone PSA. Looking over the page the only possible problem I can see is the page contains the word 'casinos'. Of course, the region happens to have gambling so it's not like I should have to avoid saying it.

[Aircut]

was it ever a good one?

[Powdork]

It's been on the page since summer 2005 and the ads on that page have only gone to psa in the last 2 or 3 days.

[humblebeginnings]

Pow,

As I mentioned in other threads, I am having PSA's (and completely irrelevant ads) on my main site for 2 days now. Seems there is something going on but only few of us got hit. Perhaps G's blacklist for naughty words got an update or something. However I can't imagine my content contains words that are considered 'bad' now.

[krod]

use the alternative ad feature.

[larryhatch]

Maybe 'wagering' and variations will get by, but this troubles me.

Suppose I put up a page about a visit to Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.
Would have to avoid the C word, just to avoid a penalty?
Imagine a site about Wisconsin that can't mention cheese. -Larry

[icedowl]

We often call it "Gaming" or "Gaming Establishments" over here in Nevada. I'd give that a try.

[Powdork]

It's not "casino". My main competitor has a guide to the areas casinos and he's got 3 full adblocks. Guess I'll go try YPN on the page for a while. BTW, can we use YPN as an alternate URL?

[Luddite]

I just changed one of my pages for this reason.

The PSAs went away shortly thereafter. The page in question was a travel guide to a particular caribbean island - The words "casino" and "gambling" each appeared 1-2 times in 500 words. While gambling wasn't really the focus of the text, they seemed to be stop words...

[MikeNoLastName]

In general I would say NOT! There are a lot of travel sites with the term that are getting appropriate ads. It may simply be that something questionable triggered a G filter. Assuming you have nothing to hide, contact Google support, tell them about the bogus PSAs and ask them to review the page and "fix the problem". Appropriate ads should start showing up within 24 hrs. We had a very similar situation and they fixed it.

[Powdork]

I contacted them yesterday. The funny thing is I am only getting Katrina ads. It's almost like bushclintonkatrina.org has targetted the page.

[MikeNoLastName]

Yeah, the adsense support folks apparently have the ability to eyeball a page and then turn the filter off. In our case we had some perfectly legitimate popular show reviews which, I'm guessing, had some questionable keywords like 'nude' or 'strip' in the description and once we sent them a "check it out" request they flipped the switch and we started getting non-PSAs again.

[Marcia]

As a generality, look through the webmaster guidelines for Yahoo's Search Submit and notice what kind of topics they don't want included. It's a pretty good barometer of what to avoid all around for longevity.

[Powdork]

Well, i got the following reply today

We've resolved the issue with Google ad targeting on
http://www.example.com/beaches.htm. If this issue reoccurs, please
let us know.

What's interesting is that I got the reply at 9:06, about 3o minutes after I switched the page to Yahoo. Exactly prior to switching it, I checked and still was receiving PSA's. So what was the tech looking at? When they check things, do they check the preview tool, or the actual page?