Tuesday, June 03, 2008

June 03, 2008
4
Well, it's finally come to that point where you hit a virtual barrier. I'm talking about adsense.

Google's adsense has a block list which supports only 200 entries. They call it the "competitive ad filter". Only 200 entries, and there's over 1000 active goldsellers. That is, indeed, a dilemma. There are a number of easy ways for google to fix that (allow wild cards, or word filters) but they just won't listen. Up to now i've just focused on the ones that have shown up on the blog and i've been adding them to the list since the day the blog got a decent number of visitors, but with the recent influx of adverts from .cn domains, that tactic just won't cut it anymore.

So there's a few options. Kill the text ads and switch to pure image ads. Ignore the goldseller ads or find another advertiser altogether. A side problem is that the "search" box also uses google adverts. I would also have to kill the search box. This should not be a big issue though as in the topleft corner of the blog there's a search box for just this blog. Not many use the search box anyway, right?

You can see part of the block list on Blog Azeroth or nogold.org. It's not updated in a while since I sort of can't log in to BA right now... >_>

I guess it'll need some thoughts. Feel free to drop a comment with suggestions if you have any. For now I'll leave it while i consider the options.

Yes, I hate gold sellers.

Update: Just noticed 3 new goldsellers. Text ads removed, search box removed (use the blogger one in the topleft). Going to experiment with alternataives for a few days.

4 comments:

CrazyKinux said...

I hear you loud and clear on this one mate. I'm (trying) doing the same thing trying to eliminate ISK seller for my EVE Online Blog (www.crazykinux.com). I'm moving closer to that limit with every new site I add. I just hope Google removes the limit so that I may keep the filter up to date.

CK

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

I find that without WOW gold sellers, I get a lot of online RPG, or D&D miniature ads. I haven't tried to block any, but I don't get targeted as much as you would.

bbr said...

I don't really mind those so much, but it's hard to really set a "target" for adsense text ads. With the referral links you can control pretty directly what you wish to show. Be careful not to select an entire category though, as there's gold sellers in there as well.