Trigger words

Example of triggering phrase

[richmondsteve]

I have several hundred pages with AdSense enabled on a site. All pages have a content box in one of the side columns with a handful of relevant news headlines. I noticed that the percentage of impressions that were PSAs/AAs gradually increased from a recent average of about 5% to 45% over the last 2 days.

I determined that it was due to a headline that consisted of a link with the following title: "Body of girl found dead". I determined this after checking a sample of 20 pages, 10 showing paying ads, 10 showing AAs, and checking for Mediapartner visits since the headline was added. Mediapartners had visited the 10 which are showing AAs, but hadn't visited the 10 showing paying ads.

For good measure I also created 2 pages which were identical except for the inclusion of that link with that tile on one of them, then checked after Mediapartners visited this afternoon. You guessed it - one showed paying ads, one showed AAs.

I haven't tried to see if it was triggered by a single word or some of those words in combination, but I thought some might find my results useful. I've removed the headline, but it could be a week or more before some of the pages are visited by Mediapartners again.

I'm probably either going to have to remember not to include headlines with certain words, modify my site's code to exclude headlines with such words from pages showing AdSense ads or obfuscate such words in the headlines.

[Symbios]

I read in another post that certain words trigger AS, dead was one of them.

[wgonz]

It happened to me few weeks ago precisely with that same word (it was in Bold at the heading of the page). After fixed, in my case it takes a couples of days to paid ads to return.

[Sanenet]

Here's a good thread discussing it:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[richmondsteve]

By the way, the reason I posted was to remind people how easily trigger words can bite you and to share some basic steps for tracking them down. As some of you probably know, trigger words caused me numerous headaches the first two months I used AdSense on one of my sites due to words that regularly appeared on most pages since the site's topic was crime.

I've probably posted in a dozen or so threads in this forum on the topic of trigger words and the problem had pretty much disappeared for the last few weeks until I added a news link without thinking about the consequences of the article's title. Live and learn.

[dazzlindonna]

someone had a good suggestion in one of the other threads to change the trigger words using ascii code. i found a tool to code the word for you. search in google for "convert text to ascii get website here" without the quotes, for the first one listed.

the other thing i've found is the number of times the word appears seems to matter. it was on my page twice. reduced it down to once by using a synonym for the second occurance, and all was good.

[richmondsteve]

dazzlindonna, the ascii code suggestion is worth a try. I'll probably test it. I never tested that in the past because in the past the trigger words were always words found in the top search phrases that led visitors to my site. Visitors was (and still is) more important than showing paying AdSense ads. I'll probably try the ASCII code solution and report back if it works. If so, I might just code my site to do the conversion whenever words from a set list are encountered.

the other thing i've found is the number of times the word appears seems to matter. it was on my page twice. reduced it down to once by using a synonym for the second occurance, and all was good.

I've noticed that as well. For anyone interested in my thoughts see message #15 in the thread Sanenet mentioned above. In the case that led me to start this thread it only took one instance of the word (or phrase - haven't narrowed it down further than I shared earlier). The pages in question averaged 400-600 words and "body" and "dead" only appeared once. So either some trigger words are given a higher weight or that was enough word density to trigger it.