Tonight, I was browsing Google Reader and cruising past a couple of my latest posts. I opened them up just to see what kind of ads Google was serving (you should do this on a regular basis).
Quick aside here: I’ve had a problem lately with shady advertisers appearing on one of my sites via Google AdSense ads. While some may say, “A click is a click”, I’ve got a relationship with my readers and want to continue to foster that relationship by holding onto their trust. Now, there’s no way that I’ll catch (and block) all of the shady advertisers; however, I’ll stop the ones that I see or the ones that readers point out to me from advertising on my sites.
Back to the point – To my surprise, I saw an advertiser that I recently filtered out from displaying on my site appearing in an AdSense ad on my feed. WTF, I thought.
I login to AdSense, and sure enough, it’s in my blocked advertiser list – or, one of them anyways.
I didn’t realize it until tonight that you must block competitive ads from your content, search results and feeds to keep them from appearing on your sites at all. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to merge the three lists. Fortunately though, a quick copy and paste to each of the other two fields solves this problem.
Just a heads up for those of you who use the competitive ad filter.
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Great advice – I have had a few dubious things show up, and I didn’t even think of this. Thanks.