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This was one of the most fun experiences of all. And I have Google to thank for it.
I had tried to put Google adsense on soksa.com about a couple of months ago, just for the fun of it. Not that I would make thousands of dollars, but hey, money is money, right? The ads never showed up. When you try to get some help out of Google, they point you to their forums; I guess they don't want to employ help staff, the community takes care of that for free. Their IVR like diagnostics pages did not help either. Whatever. I tried, could not solve the issue and gave up.
Then Google started sending me these emails; giving me free credit on ad placements, asking me to put adsense on the site etc etc. The usual marketing crap and I decided to give it another try.
After a week of back and forth on the help forum, with the help of volunteers who has nothing to gain but a click of "best answer" we finally figured out the problem; we cannot be sure though. Here are the facts:
1. the domain (soksa.com) is not blocked by Google
2. the web site (soksa.com) is and has been indexed by Google without any problems. its Google rankings are good, it's got about 2,000 pages indexed in Google.
3. the HTML structure has no issues.
Still, the ads don't show.
I copy pasted the same HTML to another domain that I have (www.kayke.com), the ads show up there. So the problem is 100% the soksa.com domain. But adsense administration console says nothing, reports no issues.
The problem, as pointed out by one helpful individual on the forums, most probably, is an article, in which there is a link to a gun site (you know, weapons, hand guns etc). The article on my site has nothing to do with selling or buying guns. But apparently the links that I have given point to various sites that do. We went to a shooting range in Delaware, and I loved it. So I posted an article and put up a link to the shooting range's web site. Apparently, this is a NO NO in Google land. If you have links that point to gun sales, gun ownership sites (not paint gun, real gun) then you are banished from adsense-land.
I personally have no issues with this. For the shortest period of time, I was surprised. For some reason I thought of Google as being a good company. You know, uphold the good stuff. Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, democracy etc. But then I remembered that they are also a company after all. They discriminate just as much as the next company. I am sure they have their reasons and they have to make money. Unfortunately I don't, over my web site. I wish the administration console was a bit more helpful with this type of crap. I mean, if you are refusing to show the ads, at least say "there is frowned upon content in your web site. we don't mind indexing it and showing it on the search results and making money over there, but we cannot let you get into our adsense syndicate" - that would be only fair.
So, it was a fun journey in the end. I had two choices: remove the content, remove the links because Google says so. Or keep the content, keep the links because, hey, they are. (think "to be or not to be"). Not that I want to turn this into a holy crusade on freedom of speech but I am merely disappointed that I realized, once again, that Internet is NOT and will never BE what we intended, or pretended it to be. FREE.
Back to my coffee
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