Hi all, I run a similar website finder site. You basically enter a domain name into the search box and it will list you sites that are similar. E.g if you type in "Google.com", it will return a list of similar/alternative search engines like yahoo, bing..etc My database has well over 1 million domain names in it with various tags associated with each website. The way I display other similar websites by comparing tags retrieved from the websites. My problem is, I recently received a warning from Google: "Google AdSense: You have 3 working days to make changes to your site This is a warning message to alert you that there is action required to bring your AdSense account into compliance with our AdSense program policies. We’ve provided additional details below, along with the actions to be taken on your part. Violation explanation GAMBLING: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on sites with content related to gambling or casinos. This policy includes driving traffic to online gambling sites through links.)." The page in question contained was a Chinese betting website and it contains a link out to it (as my website should as the main point is to give users quick access to similar sites). So I have a lot of problems at the moment: 1. How would I know what category this website is in if it's all in Chinese (or any other language?) 2. Can I just prevent links from being active on that page? Or just referencing the violating URL (without the <a> hyperlink) still violate the terms? 3. It's almost impossible to filter out ALL content that could go against Adsense T&C. I already have a adult filter that blocks adult websites using a list of matching keywords although this does not capture all adult sites as they vary so much. Sometimes a website may not even mention one adult related keyword anywhere in URL or content and there is no way for me to know to block it. First thing that came to my mind was to check what my competitors were doing, and I noticed that 3 out of 5 that I checked had active links to that same betting site and they also had Google Adsense active on the page. These websites have been running for years... would they eventually receive warnings too or does Google allow this for the "big sites". It would take forever to manually go through every website in my database and disable ads on URLs that violate the terms but that's what I currently feel is the only way. Anyone have any ideas on this? One last thing I wanted to mention was after receiving this warning, I actually noticed another warning message sent to me 3 weeks ago that I completely missed but relating to adult content (one of the sites that got through my filter). What was odd was that Google never banned me even though I never changed anything after the 72 hours. All ads are off right now while I figure this out. Sorry for the long winded post! Thanks
How are you getting the links? If you're scraping from somewhere you could write a script to read the META tags and check against a list of keywords such as adult, gambling etc and +1 to a show_ad field in the database. Some would still come through but Google should warn you for each of them so there'd still be manual work involved.
I am scraping and can pick up the keywords to prevent certain sites from displaying but there will always be some that get through such as non-English sites as well as sites that don't contain the keywords but are unsafe. If Google continues to warn me about these pages I would be happy to correct them one by one but the email warning is vague and only displays one example and says "there are others that you must correct too". I could have 1 million pages and only one violates their terms, that will end up being enough for them to shut me down, or at least thats what the feeling I'm getting from others that have been banned (fairly or unfairly). How many warnings will Google send me before they decide to ban me?
Sorry, I don't know. Other than a flagging system and/or manually reviewing whatever goes in there's not a whole lot you can do.
They've sent you a three day warning - they send just the one, they don't mess around, this way people take notice. You've done the best thing in pulling the ads otherwise by now you would be banned. If you don't remove ALL offending content under point 3, then expect a ban. The fact that other similar sites run adsense? Well unfortunately that's no defence at all, and will fall on deaf ears at adsense. Unless you do exactly as they say then even one problem link and they'll ban you as they've given you due warning twice. Three strikes and your out.