did you know - "gallery" means pr0n….

Posted by Rainer on October 1st, 2007 at 10:53am

I have just enabled AdSense inside the picture gallery of my personal site. The gallery is mostly about astronomy, space and some other definitely non-adult themes. As a reminder: AdSense is Google’s program for publishers that enables them to show relevant ads on their site and thus get paid a little bit for their hard work.

When we enabled AdWords, the result was stunning: there were a lot of softcore pr0n ads (or other “soft” adult oriented sites). After quick thinking, the solution was very clear: AdSense, in absence of better information, uses the URL for guessing keywords. And in the URL, there was the term “gallery” (pointing to the gallery module). Now, for Google was everything clear: if it is a gallery, the site must be adult-oriented. And if you know Google, you know that any such matching is based on usage stats. In other words: the average Internet (search) users associates the term “gallery” with adult-oriented material. Do you like some evidence? Sure, just see this screenshot below (click image for a better-to-read hi-res version):

As you can see, the picture was all about technical things, related to space shuttle processing.

Thankfully, Google’s AdSense crawler was quite quick. After a 15 minutes or so, relevant ads begun to appear and the adult-oriented ones were no longer seen. Check yourself and try out today’s relevant ads for that very same page:

http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery-sts120-pic-sts_120_vab_no_mlp.phtml

The bad news, though, is that AdSense seems to crawl quickly only pages that are being accessed. So I now need to either access all of my gallery content or need to life with the fact that for a couple of days people will get, well, confusing ads. I hope, however, that AdSense will crawl the rest of the site now so that this is only a temporary problem. Anyhow, I need to keep an eye on it (if you look at my site, I guess you fully understand why I don’t like these adult-oriented ads to be on it).

If everything else fails, I’ll filter out ads in my AdSense account, but this is only a last resort thing to do, as it is

a) a lot of work
b) prone to error

Issue b) is especially problematic as new ads pop up every day, so you need to keep everything updated - IMHO nothing that you can really manage to do. So it is also in Google’s best interest to keep things relevant. After all, I’d need to remove the ads if I can’t find a way to permanently get such ads out of my site.

In any case, to me it is an interesting find that “gallery” seems to be associated with adult-oriented content for the average Internet user…

Side note: I first found the effect on the gallery home page (at http://www.gerhards.net/Gallery.phtml. Due to the size of that page, I could not create a screen shot. So I used an actual picture instead, where the effect can be neatly shown (see above). It is also noteworthy that other urls clearly showed Google used the URL content for keyword targeting. For example, there is a section on the strut repair done at space shuttle Discovery (on STS-120 mission). These URLs contain the word “strut” in them. Not surprisingly, all ads were about mechanical things. There were other samples, too. So there a clear relationship between the URL and the ads. After the AdSense crawler has crawled the page, actual page content is used for targeting. And it seems to crawl pages rather quickly (well done, Google…).

Under adsense+ adwords