Policy violation, "Must fix: no"

[csdude55]

I've had several "policy violation" emails this week, mostly related to old message board threads that I guess Google has decided not to like; eg, one thread from 2 years ago complaining about a strip club in a neighboring county, and another thread from 8 years ago asking for reviews on the local gun shop.

When I check the Policy Center, it says "Must fix: no". and "Ad serving status: Restricted demand".

These threads are loaded via MySQL, so there's not a page that I can simply remove ads or anything; to do so, I would need to write some code in the header to remove ads if the ID# is whatever.

What would you guys do? Since it say that I don't HAVE to fix it, should I just ignore it? Or should I be reactive every day and remove ads programmatically in anticipation of a future policy change?

I'm also concerned that Google might go further and start punishing the page that lists the threads. Meaning, the list is at:

example.com/forum

and it's enumerated in pages, so at:

example.com/forum?page=2000

there's a subject of, "Is this a good gun store?" And the intro says, "I'm looking for a good place to buy guns and ammo. What do you think of Joe Blow's Gun Shop?"

I'm concerned that Google could arbitrarily start restricting ads on example.com/forum because of the reference to guns and ammo in the link. Losing ads on a thread from 8 years ago makes no difference to me at all, but losing them on the full list page would be a HUGE loss!

[vordmeister]

From my understanding the policy violations have now become more page related.

A few years ago the emails felt like they would delete the whole account because of something they found on a page. Now the emails seem to suggest they will just suspend ads on that page.

For me many emails have been down to translation issues from UK to US English. There was a post where members used the UK slang for cigarettes and I got an email because the same word is used by idiots in the US who can't cope with gay people.

I let the post stand as there was absulutely nothing offensive about it. I assume that post now generates no ad revenue but I haven't noticed any knock on effects to the rest of the account.

[ClosedForLunch]

Code up some logic to easily switch ad display on/off at thread level. Store this flag in the db against each thread, default to show ads.

For my sites I stop showing ads after a certain number of page views per user. This helps my ad CTR and average page speed.

Basically, don't annoy Google.

[lammert]

How important are these threads in relation to your site? Is it possible to make them visible for logged-in members only or delete them altogether? Marking threads as visible for members only is a functionality available in a lot of forum software packages.

[csdude55]

@ClosedForLunch, those aren't bad ideas at all! I'm in the middle of rebuilding everything, anyway, so now's the time to add a column to the database. And you're right, old threads are worth pennies, so it's not going to hurt anything to turn the ads off on them.

It's funny, my mentality was ALWAYS worry about the users first, Google second. But nowadays, it does seem like I had to reverse course and focus on Google first, user second! I don't have much choice in the matter, though... if you can't pay the bills, your site's not doing any good.

@lammert, most of my traffic is organic, but every once in awhile I'll have a thread that hits big on a national topic, shows up high on Google, and sends a lot of traffic (read: money) my way. So I'd be hesitant to lock them away like that. I wrote all of my software so it's not a question of whether it can be done, just whether it would have a negative financial impact.

[Grapetimes]

Do these no fix violation go away by themselves in the policy center after 7 to days?