An Glimpse into the World of Serving Google Ads

Periodically sometimes, once a week, I get a "nastygram" from Google, telling me that one of more of the pages on my website will can no longer display banner advertisements provided via Google's advertising network, Adsense, because of a content policy violation.  These ads are an important source of revenue for AALBC

Today's email indicated that these pages would not be permitted to display ads provided through Google advertising network:

Book Review: Black Silk (A Collection Of African American Erotica) by Retha Powers
http://aalbc.com/books/bookreview.php?isbn13=9780739423080

"Slaves" Versus "Enslaved Africans"
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/1587-slaves-versus-enslaved-africans/

I typically do not take any action and I just let Google just stop serving ads.  Google never says specifically what he problem is, and in the case of discussion forum posts and book reviews, I'm not changing the content.  The pages today was very involved discussion forum post and the other was a book review.  Since I'm not specifically what the problem is.  The only surefire way to correct the problem would be to delete the page. Obviously, this increases the pressure for webmasters to not create content that would potentially run afoul of Googles morality police.  

Given that Google's Adsense is effectively the only game in town for both advertising and search, Google has a say and an impact on the content of websites.   AALBC encoupasses 10's of thousands of pages, so the impact is negligible, but for smaller sites the pact can be substantial.

It could be worse; in the old days (a few years ago) Google would just stop serving ads on the entire website -- even if it was just a few pages that failed to meet their policy standards! 

This discussion forum started here: http://www.thumperscorner.com/cgi/discus/discus.cgi There were several posts that Google did not like and they would not give me a complete list of the offending pages.  As a result, I could not "clean up" the website to Google's satisfaction so Google banned the site from serving advertising.  I had no recourse: they were the judge, jury and executioner -- all behind a closed door.  That action did put a noticeable dent in the site's revenue.

I had to abandon the old discussion forum and I created a new one here on AALBC.com.  During that transition MANY of the forums active participants did not come over to the new site.  I'm not saying the migration was the only reason; the change also corresponded with the rise of Facebook, but the migration necessitated by Google was absolutely a factor.

Again I'm just sharing one aspect into Google adverse impact on the World Wide Web.  Yes Google has improved how they treat websites who violate their policies -- by isolating individual pages rather than entire websites, but again the damage they leave in their wake is done and can never be repaired.  Thomers Corner was just one websites their were of course many others...