Do Poison words words exist

Can you penalise your adverts by the words on your page?

[netchicken1]

Recently I was reading a post by an adsense publisher who said that when he used the word 'suicide' in his title and post his adverts were replaced by PSA's.

Once he removed the word the adverts returned to normal.

The question he was asking, and one I have never seen adressed, is if there are words that are 'poision words' that negativly affect your advert placement if they are in your site.

Such a thought might hold water, I can imagine words with topics such as racism, sex, abuse, etc might drop the number of advertisers to 0.

If so is there a 'poison words' list around anywhere?

[pocket calculator]

I don't know if there's a list, but I've noticed that some of my pages that happen to have articles with words related to death (including murder, suicide, terrorism, etc) only show PSAs.

[m0thman]

There certainly seems to be. When I publish a page I always stick a ?test=1 at the end of the URL and wait a bit to see what ads come up. Some topics are definitely poison although I've yet to see a definitive list and even suspect that it changes regularly (eg. sensitive news stories). I have also noticed that this effect can be sticky, ie. on a page that doesn't show ads because of a poison word - it will take a while, sometimes a couple of weeks even - hence the reason I use a "?test=1"

[Insomniak]

Well this explains a few thing. I was wondering why Google stopped showing adsense on the front page of my blog yesterday.

I just looked at the source and someone hacked my blog and put a bunch of porn links hidden off the page with css.

Hope the ads come back. At least my whole site wasn't blacklisted.

[m0thman]

I'll add to that, talking of blogs as its definitely possible for a visitor to poison your page by dropping in a few rogue comments. Furthermore, the section targeting tags (weight=ignore) don't seem to work, or at least not very well. I did lots of testing on this.

I actually converted the comments to an Ajax call to pull them in after the page had loaded. Worked fine for the ads, but it killed my traffic significantly enough to put it back the way it was in a real hurry. Took about a week to recover from that particular experiment.

[ann]

try breaking the word in a span tag. still looks the same but the bot reads it as two seperate words.

Had to do that to get rid of one pesky ad and it was the only word related to it on the page. LOL

Ann

[m0thman]

Nice idea that. Ahh the hoops we must jump through to earn our daily bread :-)

[ecmedia]

It is also common to see that mention of certain body parts even in the context of health can bring up only PSA.

[farmboy]

One of my sites has news articles (not feeds, articles I have personally written) that mention death, accidents, crimes, etc. and they don't seem to affect my ads.

FarmBoy