Ok, so I'm working on a forum for my site (well actually, its just modifying SEO Board). Seo-board doesn't include a swear filter, so I'm a bit worried about the repercussions of potentially having adsense ads on a page where there might be swearing. How have the rest of you coped with this? I understand that profanity is against the adSense TOS? Cheers, Sham.
Only Excessive profanity is against the TOS. I'd advise simply moderating the board... If you don't have time for this, any decently active board will have a few active members that would love the power trip of moderating for you... ;-) -- Derek
Keep in mind that the ultimate decision rests with Google. If you are worried, don't even take the chance.
I once had a page on my site that, for the life of me, for months couldn't get PSAs to stop showing -- there was nothing wrong with the page. I then ran across a forum post somewhere that had a list of "bad" words that Google doesn't like. One of them was the word "death" which I had used in the context of a paragraph about insurance. The minute I removed the word, my Adsense ads popped right up. I've looked on Google and elsewhere but can't find that word list again. And I don't know if this is still a problem with Google, but it's something to consider with an open forum (ummm, I wonder if this post will create PSAs on this forum??)
Aah, that's quite interesting then. Looks like I'm going to need to be careful... By the way, what's a PSA?
OK, I dd some searching around and found this list of Adsense "stop words." I cannot vouch for the accuracy or completeness of the list but I can definitely verify that two of the words caused PSAs for me, "death" and "killed". As mentioned before, I had used the words maybe four or five times, total, on a page and got nothing but PSAs for months. Removing the two words caused instant return to normal adsense ads. http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/adsense-stop-words.htm