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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I got banned because someone posted some insults/porn words in a title. There was no pictures/videos... it was just words.

They sent me the link where the words were and gave me something like 4 days (or was it more? It was a pretty scary amount of time anyway).

I went to that url and didn't find anything, so I sent them a mail asking for more info. Never had a reply. Got banned.

I discovered later that it was in the english version of my website and I didn't think about changing the language to check the content there.

Can't remember how much money I lost, wasn't a huge amount.

ps: I just got a domain banned, my other domain were still bringing me money without any problem.

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Can you really get banned for "insults/porn words in a title" on your website? Could you provide the email they sent you? That sounds so strange.

Violation explanation

COMMENT SPAM: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on pages with adult or mature content. We understand that it may be challenging to monitor user-generated content on your site including comments, forum posts or compromised content. Nevertheless, to participate in AdSense you must ensure that pages containing your ad code comply with our program policies. More information about this policy can be found in our Help Center: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=13556....

How to resolve:

If you received a notification in regard to page content, please either remove the content from your site or remove ads from the violating pages. If you received a notification in regards to the way ads are implemented on your site, please make the necessary changes to your implementation. We will automatically review the site again after 72 hours. You do not need to contact us if you make changes. Please be aware that if changes are not made within the required time frame, ad serving will be disabled to the affected website listed above.

Additionally, please be aware that the URL above is just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites that you own.

The problem is that advertisers don't want their brands associated with that kind of content. In order to keep advertisers happy, Google needs to police for content wrt to ads. It's a different set of rules than things like search results or YouTube.

The thing is, it's not appropriate to tell a website to check its user generated content in 72 hours because some of it contains spam words. I had a huuuge amount of user generated content posted every day and I def. couldn't check all of that. If they provided all the bad links it might have been possible.

I had the same problem with another site and I was scared to get in more troubles since I had another one banned. So I just disabled google ads on it.

If you have lots of UGC, then AdSense is probably not for you. A lot of companies shy away from UGC specifically because it can risk advertising revenue from higher end brands that will pay more.

Fortunately, there are many different ad networks for many different publishers. Reddit is using Adzerk ... maybe they will work for you. There's also a bunch of ad networks that specialize in different areas, including porn, gambling, etc -- stuff that Google won't ever touch. You may still be able to use AdSense if you segment where the ad is shown in places where you're less likely to have negative UGC, such as non-UGC portions of your site or forum topics that are more moderated.

Funny considering one of the original kings of user generated content is Youtube, which is owned by Google, and presumably runs Google ads.

That's the best situation, since they know the content and can segment their content very effectively. YouTube Partners and VEVO can get premium pre-roll ads because it's considered to be premium content. Content that gets flagged or has negative keywords in the title, desc, or comments may get no ads at all.

Any publisher can do this on their own. They can sell their own ad space at a premium, and use an ad network throughout the rest of the site -- it's called "remnant" inventory. If someone writes profanity or uploads something for that page, them switch the ads off, or use a different ad network that will tolerate that. High traffic sites frequently use multiple ad networks to maximize revenue yield.

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